TROUPING  FOR 
THE  TROOPS 

T 

MARGARET  MAYO 


UK1>   M.    1>K> 

BOOKSKI.I.KU 

oot*  TI:I.IX;K.VIMI 

KI.V.M>. 


ITT 


TROUPING  FOR 
THE  TROOPS 

MARGARET  MAYO 


TROOPING 
FOR    THE    TROOPS 

Fun-Making  at  the  Front 

BY 

MARGARET  MAYO 


NEW  XBJr  YORK 
GEORGE  H.  DORAN  COMPANY 


COPTRIGHT,    1919,   BY 

GEORGE  H.  DOBAN  COMPANY 


PRESTTED  IN  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 


TO 
MY  DEAR  LITTLE  MOTHER 

And  to  those  who,  like  her,  waited,  watched 
and  prayed  against  so  many  dangers  that 
never  came,  I  dedicate  these  pocket  flash- 
lights of  the  last  three  months  of  the  war  as 
seen  by  me  and  my  fellow-players  in  an  ef- 
fort to  carry  to  "the  boys"  a  message  of 
cheer  that  every  sister,  wife,  and  mother 
would  gladly  have  brought  in  our  place  had 
she  been  permitted. 


A  o  o  rr  7  7 

*g  O»  O  t)  f     8 


CONTENTS 
PART  I: 

PAGE 

ON  THE  EDGE 11 

PART  II: 

THE  ADVANCED  ZONE.  .  62 


vu 


TROUPING  FOR  THE  TROOPS 


TROUPING 
FOR  THE   TROOPS 

PART  I:  ON  THE  EDGE 

Sunday,  Sept.  8th,  1918 
Somewhere  in  France. 

It  is  just  about  one  calendar  month  since 
we  said  good-bye  to  New  York.  "We"  mean- 
ing a  band  of  six  players  from  the  "Overseas 
Theatre  League"  who  have  come  here  to  play 
under  the  "Y"  in  the  American  camps  in 
France. 

I  understand  now  why  those  at  home  are  so 
often  disappointed  in  the  lack  of  color  and 
human  detail  that  they  receive  in  the  reports 
from  the  Americans  over  here.  Things  come 
too  fast  for  us  in  this  warriors'  world  and  novel- 
ties have  become  commonplaces  before  we  can 
find  time  to  write  home  about  them.  Then, 
too,  the  lack  of  routine  in  one's  daily  life  over 
here,  the  necessity  for  constant  readjustment 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

idniew  conditions,  the  desire  to  drink  in  new 
knowledge  of  a  world  about  which  all  those  who 
have  come  before  are  eager  to  report.  All 
these  things  exhaust  both  time  and  vitality  and 
when  the  "Good  nights"  are  going  round  one 
is  glad  to  draw  the  funny,  fat,  French  feather 
bed  over  as  much  of  one's  anatomy  as  it  will 
cover  and  console  the  conscience  that  is  trying 
to  get  one  to  write  with  the  old,  familiar  "tna- 
nyana."  And  by  the  way,  I  have  discovered 
that  the  Spanish  "manyana"  and  the  French 
"tout  de  suite"  arrive  at  about  the  same  time. 

On  leaving  "the  other  side"  I  didn't  watch 
the  Goddess  of  Liberty  out  of  sight,  nor  even 
the  New  York  dock  and  in  this  I  am  told  I  was 
not  in  the  minority.  In  the  first  place,  since 
all  the  friends  and  relatives  of  passengers  had 
been  forbidden  to  come  within  more  than  gun- 
shot of  the  dock,  a  merciful  provision  for  all 
concerned  even  in  peace  times,  it  was  not  nec- 
essary either  for  them  or  for  us  to  stand  first  on 
one  foot  then  on  the  other  waving  sickly  fare- 
wells with  smiles  growing  more  and  more 
forced.  In  the  second  place,  there  were  three 
classes  of  persons  on  board,  those  eager  to  get 
away  from  conditions  at  home,  those  with 
[12] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

splendid  and  difficult  jobs  to  be  tackled  on 
"the  other  side,"  big  humanitarian  jobs,  and 
those  whose  services  the  Government  had 
drafted.  Any  and  all  of  these  motives  meant 
"eyes  straight  ahead"  not  backward. 

A  bored  ingenue  and  ex-film  actress  who 
shared  my  stateroom  with  two  other  "Over- 
seas" players,  voiced  her  feelings  about  de- 
parture without  much  ceremony  when  she 
said: 

"Why  should  I  want  to  watch  the  darned 
Goddess  out  of  sight?" 

"I'm  so  sick  of  hearing  what  those  pie-faced 
picture  stars  get,  that  I  hope  I'll  never  see  the 
'Land  of  Liberty'  again." 

I  walked  round  the  deck  soon  after  this  re- 
mark and  most  of  the  sallow  faces  and  dull 
eyes  staring  out  from  the  backs  of  steamer 
chairs  were  equally  world  weary.  Of  course 
there  had  been  the  long  drawn  fatigue  of  get- 
ting passports  and  standing  in  line  for  days  in 
badly  ventilated  offices  only  to  be  told  that 
whatever  one  had  done  or  wherever  one  had 
come,  preliminary  to  departure,  one  was  all 
wrong  and  must  start  over  again,  and  some  of 
the  lassitude  that  was  on  us  now  was  from  the 
£13] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

relief  of  not  having  to  make  out  any  more 
"questionnaires." 

About  half  way  down  the  deck,  there  was 
one  pair  of  eyes  with  a  different  light  in  them, 
a  pure,  holy,  far-seeing  light.  They  belonged 
to  a  woman  who  was  crossing  for  the  third  time 
within  a  few  months.  Her  name  was  Mrs. 
Ray  Brown.  I  believe  she  was  assisting  in  the 
extension  and  re-organisation  of  some  of  the 
hospital  systems,  though  she  never  talked  about 
herself,  so  I  do  not  know.  She,  at  least,  knew 
why  she  was  going  and  to  what. 

At  the  end  of  the  deck  I  stopped  to  look 
over  the  rail.  The  deck  below  was  swarming 
with  red-coated  Polish  soldiers.  There  was  a 
light  in  most  of  their  faces,  too,  and  a  spirit 
of  adventure  quickened  all  their  movements. 

While  I  stood  at  the  rail  General  du  Pont, 
the  powder  king,  joined  me.  He  was  in  the 
uniform  of  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.  and  going  over  not 
only  to  study  the  activities  of  that  organisation 
and  the  Red  Cross  in  relation  to  the  war,  but 
also  to  "see  the  war"  and  to  give  service  where- 
ever  the  opportunity  might  offer.  This  is  a 
sort  of  free  lance  soldiering  permitted  only  to 
men  of  unusual  power,  influence  and  money 
[14] 


GROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

and  very  much  envied  by  the  less  fortunate  who 
are  restricted  by  a  more  limited  field  of  action. 
The  General  was  joined  in  turn  by  a  rich 
young  stock-broker  who  had  been  known 
around  New  York  for  years  as  a  sort  of  harm- 
less lounge  lizard  and  indulgent  "first  nighter." 
His  ambition  at  present  was  to  get  to  the  front 
and  drive  an  ambulance  for  the  Red  Cross.  He 
had  already  acquired  the  uniform  but  I  am 
told  that  he  is  now  bewailing  his  fate  in  the 
warehouse  of  a  dull  French  port  where  he  has 
been  set  to  "counting  chemises."  Upon  hear- 
ing which,  one  of  his  friends  remarked  that  his 
reputation  on  Broadway  had  no  doubt  pre- 
ceded him. 

The  next  person  to  join  our  group  was  the 
dark,  snappy-eyed  wife  of  a  Spanish  official 
who  was  greatly  perturbed  because  America 
was  not  sending  her  most  beautiful  "cocottes" 
to  the  cafes  of  Spain  to  compete  with  the  Ger- 
man cocottes  who  were  there  in  great  numbers 
heavily  backed  by  their  government  to  spread 
German  propaganda  amongst  their  table  com- 
panions. 

We  were  interrupted  by  an  emissary  to  Bel- 
gium who  pointed  out  to  us  the  floating  city 

[15] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

that  now  surrounded  us,  merchantmen,  sailing 
vessels,  torpedo  destroyers,  battleships,  trans- 
ports, fruit  ships,  coalers,  twenty-two  in  all 
moving  forward  in  neighbourly  proximity  on  a 
sea  of  gold,  while  airplanes  and  dirigibles 
floated  like  guardian  angels  above  them.  It 
reminded  one  of  Venice  in  a  late  September 
sun  with  its  canals  and  baby  castles,  and  one 
felt  almost  as  though  it  were  possible  to  step 
about  on  this  still  sea  of  gold  from  ship  to  ship. 

At  noon  of  next  day  while  most  of  us  were 
at  "dejeuner"  our  particular  ship,  the  fastest 
of  the  convoy  suddenly  leapt  ahead.  The 
change  in  speed  was  so  sudden  and  so  apparent 
that  some  of  the  men  went  up  on  deck  to  in- 
quire about  it.  They  learned  that  a  submarine 
had  hit  a  provision  ship  just  in  our  wake  and 
coir  captain  having  women  and  children  aboard, 
had,  according  to  his  orders,  put  on  "full  speetl 
ahead."  In  an  incredibly  short  time  we  were 
out  in  the  now  gray  sea  alone. 

That  night  and  every  night  no  lights  were 
permitted  on  deck,  even  the  illuminated  wrist- 
watches  which  most  of  the  passengers  wore 
were  ordered  "turned  in,"  meaning  inside  out 

[16] 


TROUPIISTG    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

on  the  wrist.  The  air  was  heavy  and  hot  and 
the  staterooms  overcrowded  and  we  were  still 
in  the  danger  zone  so  most  of  the  passengers 
preferred  to  remain  on  deck  and  finally,  when 
most  of  these  dark  mysterious  figures  had 
ceased  bumping  into  each  other  and  apologis- 
ing for  having  got  into  the  wrong  chairs,  arms, 
or  laps,  one  of  the  American  "entertainers" — 
Gray  by  name — woke  many,  and  amused  some 
of  us,  by  marching  along  the  deck  with  three  at- 
tendants and  calling  out  in  a  military  manner 
"Cover  up  your  wrist  watches  and  your  lieuten- 
ants." I 
When  we  looked  round  the  deck  in  the  ap- 
proaching dawn  we  realised  to  how  many  cou- 
ples this  command  might  have  applied  and 
during  the  day  the  number  of  uniforms  on  deck 
seemed  constantly  to  increase.  We  got  the  ex- 
planation of  this  at  about  the  same  time  that  it 
reached  the  Captain.  Besides  the  officers  who 
were  booked  on  our  deck  there  was  a  full  com- 
pany of  our  boys  in  the  steerage  and  two  hun- 
dred and  fifty  other  boys  who  were  trying  to 
catch  up  with  their  commands,  having  taken 
too  long  on  previous  occasions  to  bid  their 
Weethearts  "good-bye."  Among  the  former 

117] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

was  the  son  of  a  Milwaukee  brewer  who  pays 
taxes  on  thirty  million  a  year.  When  the  pangs 
of  hunger  began  to  gnaw,  our  government  hav- 
ing neglected  to  equip  these  boys  with  the  bread 
baskets  with  which  the  average  steerage  pas- 
senger "pieces  out/*  the  son  of  our  many  times 
millionaire  remembered  a  rich  friend  of  his 
father's  who  was  reported  as  being  aboard  ship. 
A  message  was  manoeuvred  to  the  said  friend 
and  a  return  message  was  accompanied  by  an 
official  permit  for  young  brewer  to  visit  "fath- 
er's friend"  on  deck.  This  was  the  beginning  of 
a  two  days'  successful  foraging  campaign  from 
the  steerage  to  the  first  class.  Those  below 
who  had  no  friends  above,  got  the  word  up  on 
deck  and  were  adopted.  If  they  were  not  al- 
ways permitted  to  visit  their  unseen  protectors 
they  could  at  least  receive  sweets  and  food  from 
them  and  by  noon  of  the  second  day  every 
woman  on  board  was  surreptitiously  dropping 
part  of  her  meal  into  a  paper  in  her  lap  and 
stealing  out  on  deck  with  it  to  some  waiting 
"prowler." 

But  on  the  morning  of  the  third  day  when 
an  overly  hungry  youth  called  at  the  state- 
room of  one  of  these  ladies  before  she  had  had 

[18] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE,    TROOPS 

her  bath  and  asked  for  the  breakfast  promised 
him,  the  stewardess  who  was  in  attendance 
thought  the  matter  had  gone  far  enough  and 
evidently  reported  her  observations  to  head- 
quarters and  by  noon  time  the  Captain  had  is- 
sued orders  that  no  more  visits  were  to  be  per- 
mitted from  the  Netherlands. 

There  was  a  great  deal  of  bemoaning  about 
this  and  some  depressing  rumours  came  up 
from  below.  First  of  all  one  of  the  boys  down 
there  died  of  heart  failure  and  was  buried  at 
sea,  a  second  one  engaged  in  a  peppery  bout 
with  one  of  his  fellows,  was  knocked  off  or  fell 
overboard,  a  third  jumped  over  and  was 
drowned.  Each  of  us  tried  to  argue  that  a  life 
more  or  less  mattered  little  when  so  many  were 
going  to  the  sacrifice  but  each  of  us  felt  the 
double  tragedy  of  these  mere  boys  going  under 
without  the  big  chance  of  first  "going  over  the 
top." 

On  the  first  Sunday  morning  of  the  voyage 
the  sunlight  returned  to  us  and  I  ambled  out 
on  deck.  I  heard  a  monotonous  mumbling.  I 
followed  the  direction  of  the  sound  and  soon 
looked  down  on  hundreds  of  red  coats  on  the 
backs  of  kneeling  Polish  soldiers.  Against  a 

[19] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

background  of  ally  flags  a  priest  in  white  vest- 
ments officiated  at  an  emergency  altar  made  up 
of  packing  cases.  A  ray  of  sunlight  fell  aslant 
of  his  face  as  he  turned  with  uplifted  arms  to 
pronounce  the  benediction. 

The  next  night  I  stood  at  the  door  of  the 
saloon  after  dinner  with  Parker  Nevin,  a  typi- 
cal New  Yorker.  The  curtains  were  drawn  to 
shut  out  the  light  from  prowling  submarines 
and  the  decks  outside  were  pitch  black,  but  in- 
side, the  atmosphere  was  quite  as  gay  as  in 
peace  times  and  the  lights  quite  as  bright. 
Some  Y.  M.  C.  A.  "Entertainers/5  two  of  them 
members  of  my  unit,  had  just  concluded  a 
show  that  would  not  have  bored  a  lover  of  the 
Ziegf  eld  Follies,  and  a  dance  was  now  starting 
in  which  there  was  no  small  sprinkling  of  "Y" 
and  Red  Cross  uniforms.  At  the  far  end  of 
the  corridor  through  a  cloud  of  smoke,  one 
could  see  other  members  of  these  two  organiza- 
tions sipping  light  wines,  smoking  and  playing 
bridge.  It  was  all  harmless  enough  but 
picturesque.  I  heard  Parker  Nevin's  sigh.  I 
turned  to  see  him  shaking  his  head  sadly.  I 
asked  his  trouble.  He  answered  with  a  sad  lit- 
tle smile  that  the  world  was  all  upside  down, 
[20] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

"The  Y.  M.  C.  A.  dancing  and  the  Red  Cross 
drinking  and  the  soldiers  praying." 

The  short  respite  from  danger  zone  to  dan- 
ger zone  was  soon  over  and  new  interest  was 
provided  when  we  failed  to  meet  our  convoy  oa 
the  other  side,  at  either  of  the  spots  designated. 
Using  his  own  judgment  our  Captain  shot 
ahead  full  speed  unconducted  and  a  more  de- 
corous fellow  ship  just  behind  that  waited  for 
the  convoy  was  torpedoed  for  its  pains. 

The  moon  hurst  forth  on  our  last  night 
aboard,  round  and  red  as  harvest,  and  at  mid- 
night with  the  flood  tide  we  made  our  way  up 
the  beautiful  Gironde  with  "La  Belle  France" 
smiling  from  either  shore.  All  the  steamer 
chairs  were  occupied  and  many  confidential 
promises  were  exchanged.  Then  again  there 
were  those  who  sat  apart  gazing  silently  out 
over  the  waters  toward  the  soft,  mysterious 
tree-fringed  shores.  Was  this  new  phase  of  life 
going  to  fill  the  aching  void  or  would  it,  too, 
disappoint  them? 

With  the  early  morning  came  all  the  hustle 
and  confusion  of  disembarking  at  Bordeaux. 
Officials  demanding  passports  and  health  cer- 

[21] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

tificates  and  giving  landing  permits  to  some 
and  subjecting  others  who  were  under  suspicion 
to  further  examination,  luggage  to  be  weighed 
and  checked,  identification  papers  and  photo- 
graphs to  be  signed — Heaven  knows  what  other 
details — and  then  all  of  us  loaded  into  the  toy 
French  train  bound  for  Paris.  On  our  way  to 
the  station  we  passed  our  Polish  friends,  hun- 
dreds of  them,  in  their  red  coats  marching  with 
a  jaunty  air  and  smiling  faces.  "Bon  chance  1" 
we  called  to  them  with  lumps  in  our  throats  and 
they  called  back  similar  farewells  to  us. 

Then  hours  of  soul  satisfying  landscape  each 
of  us  exclaiming  at  first  at  sight  of  a  new  cha- 
teau, picturesque  courtyard  or  vineyard,  then 
one  by  one  subsiding  under  the  calm  of  the 
beautiful  well  tilled  fields,  winding  streams 
edged  with  poplars  and  the  low  lying  hills  over 
which  creep  the  white  ribbon  roads  that  lose 
themselves  in  the  pale  blue  horizon. 

But  we  were  barely  under  the  spell  of  all  this 
gentle  domesticity  when  we  were  startled  out 
of  our  reverie  by  suddenly  whizzing  through  a 
dusty  covered,  training  encampment  of  Ameri- 
can soldiers  and  here  we  caught  our  first  sight 
of  German  prisoners.  They  were  laying  Ameri- 

[22] 


TKOUPINGi    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

can  tracks  under  the  direction  of  American 
engineers  and  a  little  further  on  we  saw  Ameri- 
can locomotives  and  cars  moving  hundreds  of 
American  flying  machines  over  American 
tracks  already  laid.  From  here  on  the  land- 
scape was  repeatedly  dotted  by  signs  of  the 
most  stirring  American  activity.  There  was  a 
certain  pathos  in  the  picture  of  a  bent-backed 
old  Frenchman  bringing  his  one  or  two  cows 
round  his  hay  stack  into  his  quiet  little  court- 
yard only  to  see  them  sent  flying  for  their  lives 
before  a  huge  American  motor  truck  that  came 
rattling  across  his  court  yard  almost  upon  his 
heels. 

One  began  to  speculate  as  to  the  permanent 
change  that  busy  industrial  America  was  go- 
ing to  effect  in  dreamy  picturesque  France. 

It  was  night  when  we  crept  into  Paris.  No 
eager  porters,  "f  acteurs,"  to  snatch  our  luggage 
from  our  hands,  no  one  even  to  lift  it  from  the 
railway  carriages.  We  shoved,  pulled,  or 
pushed  it  onto  the  platform  as  best  we  could 
and  struggled  with  it  up  an  escalator  that  was 
not  working.  Outside  in  the  semi-darkness  a 
few  army  cars  and  trucks  loaned  to  the  Y.  M. 

[23] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

C.  A.  were  waiting  to  take  us  to  our  various 
hotels  and  with  hasty  good-byes  to  ship  ac- 
quaintances scattering  now  to  all  parts  of 
France,  we  rattled  away  over  the  cobble  stones 
into  the  narrow  winding  byways,  across  the 
Seine  that  shone  like  a  silver  ribbon  in  the 
moonlight  and  into  the  lovely  white,  still  gar- 
dens of  the  Tuileries. 

We  gasped  at  the  beauty  of  it  all.  I  had 
seen  Paris  many  times  in  the  full  glare  of  its 
yellow  night  lights,  its  tawdry  night  prowlers 
exchanging  cheap  pleasantries,  everything 
false,  fakey  and  covered  with  tinsel  to  enslave 
and  betray  the  senses  of  the  already  bewildered 
stranger,  but  I  had  never  seen  Paris  robbed  of 
cheap  camouflage  lit  only  by  the  moon  and  the 
starlight  and  a  faint  green  ray  that  peeped 
from  beneath  the  heads  of  the  elevated  street 
lamps ;  it  was  as  though — some  one  of  our  party 
remarked — as  though  old  Paris  were  dead  and 
the  soul  of  new  Paris  were  arising  out  of  the 
debris. 

When  we  reached  the  Hotel,  the  "Y"  had 
seen  to  it  that  our  rooms  and  a  hot  supper  were 
waiting. 

As  I  looked  down  the  long  supper  table  I 
[241 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

knew  for  the  first  time  just  how  many  sorts 
and  conditions  of  men  and  women  had  crossed 
under  the  auspices  of  the  "Y"  on  our  steamer. 
There  were  "spiritual  advisers"  as  the  boys  call 
them,  engineers  for  hut  construction  and  road 
building,  supply  men  to  assist  in  the  provision- 
ing of  these  huts,  athletic  instructors,  canteen 
workers,  secretaries,  stenographers,  bankers, 
and  other  important  American  financiers  and 
last,  but  not  least  popular,  our  own  little  band 
of  American  "entertainers"  bound  for  we 
knew  not  what  nor  where.  The  interesting  in- 
struction given  us  before  leaving  America  was 
so  to  arrange  our  programme  that  we  would 
not  be  disconcerted  if  we  found  it  necessary  to 
cut  our  "show"  in  half  and  rush  on  to  another 
camp  where  the  boys  were  about  to  go  into  ac- 
tion and  needed  relief  from  their  tense  state  of 
thought.  Upon  talking  to  some  of  the  Gen- 
erals since,  I'm  inclined  to  agree  with  them 
that  it  is  the  boys  who  have  just  come  out  of 
action,  having  been  obliged  to  fight  across  the 
bodies  of  their  fallen  comrades,  the  boys  who 
are  trying  to  forget  the  sight  of  staring  eyes 
in  ghastly  upturned  faces,  these  are  the  boys 
who  need  to  be  wakened  from  their  trance  of 

[25]' 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

horror  and  brought  back  to  a  realisation  that 
the  world  still  laughs  and  plays  somewhere. 
These  are  the  boys  that  we  are  hoping  later  to 
reach. 

After  supper  we  were  informed  that  we  were 
to  report  at  a  little  chapel  just  back  of  the 
Madeleine  at  9.30  the  next  morning  for  "con- 
ference." A  murmur  of  rebellion  was  distinct- 
ly audible  as  we  made  our  way  to  bed.  Early 
morning  conference  about  a  lot  of  Y.  M.  C.  A. 
dogma  that  could  not  possibly  interest  us  when 
we  were  all  dying  to  spend  our  first  morning 
in  Paris  basking  in  the  sunlight,  gazing  in  shop 
windows,  or  sipping  our  coffee,  French  fash- 
ion, at  the  dirty  little  outdoor  tables  looking 
out  on  the  busy  boulevards, 

The  spirit  of  resentment  was  so  strong  in 
some  of  the  travellers  that  they  did  not  go 
near  the  Chapel  the  next  morning.  Theirs  was 
the  loss  for  those  of  us  who  went  to  "scoff  re- 
mained to  pray." 

We  found  not  only  a  part  of  our  ship's  party 
there  but  hundreds  of  other  recent  arrivals 
under  the  "Y."  Some  had  come  by  way  of 
[26] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

England,  some  on  Army  transports,  some  on 
passenger  ships. 

The  handful  of  men  waiting  to  talk  to  us 
in  an  informal  way  was  not  made  up  of 
"preachers"  as  we  had  supposed  it  would  be 
but  of  various  workers — representing  the  more 
important  branches  of  the  "  Y,"  activities,  work- 
ers who  had  been  at  their  jobs  for  many 
months,  who  had  served  not  only  in  Paris  and 
in  the  advanced  zones  of  war  but  some  of  them 
up  to  the  front  line  trenches.  j 

They  were  not  there  to  make  us  feel  their 
superiority  or  offer  advice;  they  were  there  to 
hold  out  their  hands  and  help  us  across  the 
stepping  stones  on  which  their  poor  feet  and 
hearts  had  too  often  been  bruised.  They  were 
there  to  beg  that  we,  fresh  from  an  unridden 
country  with  strong  nerves  and  brave  hearts, 
remember  always  the  shattered  condition  of 
the  nerves  of  our  French  allies  ridden  by 
four  years  of  war,  privation  and  discourage- 
ment. They  asked  the  question,  how  many 
out  of  the  hundreds  of  us  assembled  there  were 
now  living  in  the  houses  in  which  we  were  born ; 
three  persons  raised  hands.  They  asked  how 
many  of  us  were  living  in  houses  in  which  we 

[27] 


GROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

had  been  for  more  than  ten  years.  A  few  more 
persons  raised  hands.  Then  they  asked  us  to 
remember  that  the  average  Frenchman  was 
accustomed  to  live  not  only  in  the  house  of  his 
birth  but  in  the  house  in  which  his  grandfather 
and  his  great-grandfather  had  lived  and  that 
when  this  home  was  invaded,  or  threatened  by 
invasion,  he  was  like  a  lost  child  crying  out  in 
the  wilderness  and  yet  each  one  of  the  men  and 
women  amongst  whom  we  were  to  take  up  our 
duties  had  lived  in  constant  dread  of  losing  the 
little  left  to  them  and  there  was  not  one  among 
them  who  had  not  lost  at  least  one  person  out 
of  their  lives  whose  coming  had  once  quickened 
their  pulses. 

The  speakers  also  reminded  us  that  there 
were  many  tired,  overworked,  disappointed 
Americans  who  also  deserved  our  patience  and 
our  admiration,  men  and  women  who  had  vol- 
unteered at  the  very  outset  of  the  struggle  who 
had  given  up  good  lucrative  positions  at  home, 
some  of  them  big  executive  positions,  and  who 
for  the  good  of  the  cause  had  forced  them- 
selves to  fit  into  dull  obscure  niches  over  here 
and  work  for  eighteen  hours  a  day  at  secre- 
tarial jobs  which  they  had  outgrown  at  home 
[28] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

in  their  youth.  Some  of  the  jobs  were  in  out  of 
the  way  ports  far  from  Paris  or  the  battle  line, 
or  from  anything  to  stimulate  interest  in  their 
performance  and  yet  because  some  one  must 
do  this  dull  work  these  men  and  women  had 
consented  to  be  the  martyrs* 

It  takes  seven  men  behind  the  line  to  keep 
one  man  in  the  line  so  the  experts  have  figured 
out  and  the  man  to  be  pitied  is  the  man  who 
has  come  to  France  with  high  hopes  of  pictur- 
esque service  only  to  find  himself  the  seventh 
behind  the  gun,  relegated  to  counting  packing 
cases  in  some  out  of  the  way  port. 

After  our  approaching  relations  with  the 
French  had  been  touched  upon,  the  engineer 
at  the  head  of  the  hut  construction  told  us  how: 
his  men  were  managing  to  complete  one  hut  a 
day  at  an  evarege  cost  of  from  fifteen  to  twenty 
thousand  dollars.  He  told  us  something  of  the 
difficulty  of  procuring  the  materials  for  these 
huts  and  how  diplomatic  bodies  both  in  France 
and  America  had  to  pass  upon  a  request  for 
even  a  few  pounds  of  nails.  Next  followed  a 
report  from  one  of  the  supply  agents  who  ex- 
plained that  by  command  of  General  Pershing 
the  "Y."  had  taken  over  the  grocery  depart* 
[29]; 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

ment  in  addition  to  its  canteen  business.  We 
learned  that  bacon  was  worth  so  much  in 
Spain,  chocolate  so  much  here,  sweet  crackers 
so  much  there,  etc.,  and  to  our  amazement  we 
learned  that  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.  in  France  alone 
was  handling  in  its  construction  and  provision 
department  more  than  one  hundred  million  dol- 
lars a  year. 

Next  came  a  report  from  one  of  the  athletic 
directors  and  from  him  we  learned  that  Gen- 
eral Pershing  had  just  directed  the  "Y."  to 
teach  baseball  to  both  the  American  and 
French  troops.  He  explained  the  inclination 
of  the  naturally  polite  Frenchman  to  sacrifice 
a  home  run  while  he  apologised  to  his  opponent 
for  having  seemed  rude  to  him,  he  said  too  that 
the  Frenchmen  were  often  more  anxious  to  ac- 
quire our  slang  than  our  strokes.  Every  good 
play  with  a  Frenchman  was  a  "peepin." 

One  of  the  most  important  banking  men  in 
America  who  had  enlisted  in  the  service  of  the 
"Y"  spoke  of  what  he  hoped  to  accomplish  in 
the  way  of  better  exchange  and  somewhere  far 
down  the  line  some  of  the  veteran  "spiritual  ad- 
visers" were  permitted  a  word.  They  were 
each  of  them  men,  every  inch,  sunny,  brave, 
[30] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

and  with  faces  radiating  healthy  humour  and 
fine  understanding. 

Their  warning  to  the  new  arrivals  was  not 
to  take  advantage  of  a  world  crisis  to  thrust 
their  personal  creeds  or  propaganda  down  the 
throats  of  the  defenceless  but  rather  to  avoid 
reference  to  any  creed  and  to  post  in  the  huts 
an  announcement  of  a  Jewish  ceremony  as 
quickly  as  the  announcement  of  a  Presbyterian 
one.  They  were  urged  to  allow  then*  lives  and 
their  deeds  rather  than  their  words  to  indicate 
their  motives  and  one  so-called  "preacher" 
gave  the  following  rule  of  living  as  sufficient 
creed  for  any  man: 

"Keep  yourself  persistently  at  your  best; 

"Keep  yourself  persistently  in  the  presence 
of  the  best ; 

"Be  your  best  and  share  your  best." 

On  my  way  home  to  luncheon  I  kept  repeat- 
ing the  words  of  this  last  speaker  and  I  ap- 
plied his  rule  mentally  to  the  whole  art  of  liv- 
ing, the  aesthetic  side,  the  business  side,  the 
physical  and  the  spiritual  side.  It  seemed 
equally  sound  in  control  of  either. 

When  I  got  back  to  the  hotel  I  found 
[31] 


TROUPmG    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

a  "Y"  secretary  who  had  the  Paris  division  of 
camp  entertainment  in  charge,  waiting  to 
ask  if  our  Unit  of  six  would  play  in  the  Tuil- 
eries  Gardens  on  Sunday  afternoon  to  an  au- 
dience of  twenty-five  thousand  soldiers.  There 
was  to  be  a  sort  of  continuous  performance,  the 
first  of  its  kind  ever  given,  it  was  to  run  from 
two  until  seven  and  three  regimental  bands 
and  three  singers  from  the  Opera  Comique 
were  to  fill  a  large  part  of  the  programme. 
Being  a  fatalist,  I  accepted  though  it  seemed  to 
me  that  our  few  small  personalities  and  our 
limited  bag  of  tricks  could  not  go  far  in  the 
open,  scattered  amongst  twenty-five  thousand 
men  of  dissimilar  tastes  and  tongues.  It  was  a 
golden  afternoon  when  we  made  our  way  up 
the  high  platform  in  the  centre  of  the  Gardens. 
A  backing  of  lattice  and  a  roof  of  overhanging 
boughs  was  our  only  enclosure,  yet,  strangely 
enough  almost  every  line  that  we  spoke  or  sang 
got  a  hearty  and  almost  universal  response. 
After  the  performance  which  was  hailed  as  a 
great  success  we  were  photographed  and  pam- 
pered and  sent  back  to  our  hotel  in  one  of  the 
Army  cars.  Frenchmen  doffed  their  caps  to 
us  as  we  passed  and  Americans  cheered  us.  It 
[32] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

was  all  very  exciting  and  much  too  pleasant  to 
seem  like  war  work.  I  remembered  the  rather 
stinging  remark  of  a  General  in  whose  com- 
pany I  had  dined  the  night  before,  as  guest  of 
the  Paymaster  of  Marines.  The  General  had 
been  in  an  important  command  at  Belleau 
Woods  a  few  weeks  before  when  the  Marines 
prevented  the  Boche  from  entering  Paris.  He 
had  acquitted  himself  so  well  that  he  was  to 
receive  the  Legion  of  Honour  on  the  morning 
following  our  dinner  party.  He  was  not  a 
sentimentalist  and  he  said  that  if  the  over- 
seas entertainers  were  serious  in  wishing 
to  accomplish  real  good  they  would  devote  very 
little  time  to  the  camps  around  Paris  but  get  as 
quickly  as  possible  to  the  boys  fresh  from  ac- 
tion and  scenes  of  horror.  I  was  glad  to  have 
played  in  the  Tuileries  but  eager  to  press  on 
toward  the  front. 

The  next  day,  our  last  in  Paris  for  a  long 
while  to  come,  we  lunched  at  the  Ritz,  or  at 
least  most  of  us  did  so,  some  of  us  as  the 
guests  of  General  du  Pont  who  had  crossed 
with  us  on  the  steamer  and  who  was  now  bid- 
ding us  Godspeed  and  I  as  the  guest  of  Mary 
Young  and  John  Craig,  who  were  in  town  for 

[33] 


GROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

a  few  days  to  get  supplies  and  who  were  eager 
to  tell  me  of  the  splendid  success  they  were  hav- 
ing in  the  Camps  with  "Baby  Mine."  They  had 
asked  me  for  the  use  of  the  play  when  the  first 
ship-load  of  our  boys  were  sailing  for  France 
and  while  I  had  been  proud  of  the  opportunity 
to  give  it  for  such  a  cause,  I  had  been  sceptical 
about  their  being  able  to  get  any  effect  from 
it,  played  in  tents  or  out-of-doors,  with  no 
scenery  or  properties.  They  now  told  me 
laughingly  how  they  carried  three  large  bisque 
dolls  under  their  arms  to  represent  the  babies 
and  balanced  a  soap  or  cracker  box  on  two 
chairs  to  suggest  a  cradle  and  tried,  when  pos- 
sible, to  seat  the  boys  above  them  in  a  semi- 
circle on  the  hillside  and  in  this  way  they  could 
play  to  thousands  at  one  performance.  Their 
eyes  were  dancing  with  the  joy  of  the  good 
they  were  doing  and  as  I  looked  across  the  table 
at  these  two  who  had  closed  up  their  splendid 
house  in  Boston  and  turned  their  backs  on  the 
Stock  Company  it  had  taken  them  years  to 
establish  it  seemed  to  me  that  Mary  still  looked 
only  a  child — and  yet  she  and  John  had  already 
given  two  boys  to  the  army  and  one  of  them  to 
the  Field  of  Honour — and  would  continue  to 

[34] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

give  of  their  best  until  the  last  big  gun  should 
be  fired. 

Just  now,  with  characteristic  generosity,  it 
was  their  fixed  purpose  to  make  me  feel  that  it 
was  my  play  that  had  been  responsible  for  their 
success  and  while  I  knew  quite  differently  they 
did  succeed  in  giving  me  a  stouter  heart  for  the 
bit  that  I  was  hoping  to  contribute  to  this 
"Man's  War"  and  everything  seemed  to  get 
very  bright  in  the  big  restaurant  and  I  no- 
ticed for  the  first  time,  that  the  sun  had  come 
out. 

I  looked  round  the  Ritz  and  contrasted  the 
present  picture  with  that  of  the  old  days  when 
Maxine  Elliot  used  to  sit  at  a  certain  round 
table  in  the  corner  in  all  her  luscious  beauty, 
bankers,  leading-men,  tennis  and  polo  cham- 
pions hanging  over  the  back  of  her  chair.  I 
remembered  a  smaller  table  where  Ethel  Levy 
used  to  lunch  during  her  great  success  in  her 
first  Parisienne  review,  and  the  chair  on  her 
left  where  her  favourite  poodle  used  to  sit  in 
state  and  a  chair  on  her  right  usually  occupied 
by  the  Younger  Guitry.  The  scene  was  much 
changed  now.  In  the  entire  length  of  the  din- 
ing-room and  in  the  charming  court  outside, 

[35] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

the  only  men  to  be  seen  out  of  uniform  were 
the  waiters  and  the  few  women  present  were 
also  mostly  in  uniform,  Red  Cross  or  Y.  M.  C. 
A.,  and  at  a  little  table  apart,  wrapped  in  a 
long  dark  service  cape,  a  veil  bound  round  her 
now  serious  brow,  sat  the  once  gay  and  colour- 
ful Elsie  de  Wolfe.  And  on  every  side  men  in 
khaki,  blue,  or  grey,  but  of  all  the  uniforms 
present  it  seemed  to  me  that  the  grey  one  with 
the  black  and  white  trimmings,  that  of  the 
Italian  flying  corps,  was  the  most  interesting 
and  the  most  distinguished. 

In  spite  of  changed  accoutrements  and  con- 
ditions the  same  old  gentle  reassuring  dignity 
hung  over  the  Ritz  guests,  like  a  soft  gauze 
canopy  not  to  be  pierced  by  harsh  sounds.  And 
the  greetings  and  recognitions  and  good-byes 
that  would  have  been  boisterous  in  the  street 
outside  sounded  only  like  the  humming  of  bees 
in  June  time.  A  Ritz  is  always  a  Ritz  I 
thought  as  we  passed  out  into  the  pebble  pathed 
sunlit  garden  for  our  coffee. 

At  the  far  end  of  the  garden,  sipping  his  cof- 
fee and  smoking  a  made-to-order  cigarette,  sat 
George  Burr,  in  earnest  conference  with  two 
officials  of  the  Red  Cross.  He  had  abandoned 

[36] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

the  administration  of  large  offices  in  every  im- 
portant city  in  America  and  crossed  the  ocean 
to  offer  his  services  to  the  Red  Cross  in  any  ca- 
pacity in  which  they  could  use  him — no  matter 
how  humble.  He  had  no  premonition  that  he 
was  soon  to  become  the  beloved  head  of  the 
whole  organization  and  be  known  by  the  fond 
title  of  "The  Big  Col." 

He  was  joined  by  Gilbert  White,  America's 
most  famous  unpublished  wit,  now  serving  in 
the  Signal  Corps,  and  by  Mrs.  Florence  Ken- 
dal.  Gilbert  had  just  drawn  a  cartoon  of  Mrs. 
Kendal,  a  charming  young  woman  of  fifty, 
leaving  New  York  to  establish  an  officer's  con- 
valescent home  in  France.  On  the  curb,  wav- 
ing good-bye  to  his  mother  as  she  passed  down 
Fifth  Avenue,  stood  her  popular  son  Mess- 
more.  He  was  saying  ruefully  to  the  bystand- 
ers— "I'm  too  old  to  fight  but  I'm  sending 
mother." 

We  all  had  a  good  laugh  at  Gilbert's  cartoon, 
then  simultaneously,  every  one  seemed  to  real- 
ize that  "dejune" — the  only  enjoyable  respite 
still  permitted  in  war  time — was  over  and  with- 
in a  few  minutes  the  garden  and  restaurant 
were  silent  and  deserted. 

[37] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

That  night  another  Army  car  tore  its  way 
through  the  streets  with  us  and  out  into  the 
country  to  a  little  band  of  engineers  stationed 
near  some  barge  canal.  When  we  arrived  they 
were  still  busy  with  saw  and  hammer  finishing 
a  platform  which  they  had  erected  hurriedly 
under  a  canvas  covering.  We  were  chilled  to 
the  bone  and  a  little  depressed  by  the  dim  light 
of  two  tottering  torches  but  we  gave  what 
spirit  we  could  to  the  show  and  left  to  their 
hurrahs,  never  having  clearly  understood  to 
whom  we  had  really  played. 

The  next  morning  we  left  Paris  amidst  the 
customary  confusion  of  mysterious  servants 
arriving  in  the  hotel  lobby  at  the  last  moment 
and  the  laundry  that  always  returns  only  in 
time  to  be  carried  under  one's  arm. 

We  had  already  begun  the  shedding  process 
so  familiar  to  even  the  most  experienced  trav- 
ellers who  come  over  in  war  time.  Most  of  us 
had  left  our  trunks  containing  quantities  of 
soap  and  shoes  and  sugar  in  the  keeping  of  our 
landlords,  having  cussed  out  the  misinf  ormants 
on  the  other  side  who  had  told  us  that  these 
[38] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

and  many  other  things  were  not  to  be  had  in 
Paris. 

Our  first  meal  in  the  hotel  had  shown  us  that 
Paris  was  suffering  from  less  food  restriction 
than  we  were  at  home,  and  our  first  promenade 
up  the  Avenue  de  FOpera  had  opened  our  eyes 
to  the  astonishing  fact  that,  now  as  always, 
everything  in  the  world  was  to  be  bought  in 
Paris  and  many  military  things  in  much  snap- 
pier more  convenient  design  than  at  home. 
Even  the  woollens  of  which  we  had  been 
warned  there  was  such  a  scarcity,  were  dis- 
played in  every  outfitter's  window. 

We  had  meant  to  write  home  about  all  these 
things  for  the  sake  of  other  benighted  travel- 
lers who  would  no  doubt  follow  us,  and  now  we 
were  leaving  Paris  without  having  found  time 
for  more  than  the  conventional  cable  home 
"Well  and  happy." 

At  the  station  again  confusion  and  distress, 
no  porters,  insufficient  help  for  the  weighing 
and  checking  of  baggage,  no  compartments  to 
be  reserved,  necessity  for  showing  passports 
and  getting  movement  orders  stamped  in  order 
to  "check  out,"  train  about  to  leave  and  only 
one  or  two  bored  officials  to  serve  long  lines  of 

[39] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

excited  travellers,  indifferent  shrugging  of 
shoulders  on  part  of  officials  and  yet  some  way 
or  other  when  the  toy  train  at  last  departed, 
amidst  shrill  boastful  whistling,  all  those  who 
had  hoped  to  be  aboard  had  managed  to  be 
there,  hot,  angry  and  perspiring  to  be  sure, 
but  present. 

Some  hours  later  our  unit  of  six  was  clatter- 
ing up  the  main  street  of  Chaumont,  one  of 
the  most  picturesque,  most  historic  villages  in 
France.  We  were  on  our  way  to  the  principal 
hotel  at  G.  H.  Q. — meaning  the  General 
Headquarters  of  the  American  Army  in 
France.  If  we  had  put  on  a  wishing  cap  and 
succeeded  in  winning  our  wish  we  could  scarce- 
ly have  found  ourselves  in  a  more  fortunate 
spot  as  a  starting  point  for  our  campaign  of 
the  American  camps. 

Even  before  we  reached  our  hotel  we  were 
receiving  familiar  hellos  from  every  side  and 
before  we  had  had  time  to  register  and  get  to 
our  rooms  we  had  had  to  put  our  luggage  down 
time  and  again  to  shake  hands  with  old  friends 
from  England,  America,  anywhere  and  every- 
where for  to  G.  H.  Q.  sooner  or  later  comes 
almost  every  one  engaged  in  the  business  of 
[40] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

war.  High  officials,  war  correspondents, 
magazine  writers,  camera  and  "movie"  men, 
Red  Cross  workers,  canteen  officers,  American 
politicians  and  millionaires  over  draft  age  on 
their  way  to  the  front  to  catch  a  quick  glimpse 
of  the  war,  spies,  staff  officers,  supply  agents, 
all  kinds,  colours  and  conditions  of  men  of  all 
orders  and  ranks  and  degrees  of  preferment. 

We  got  to  our  rooms  as  soon  as  we  could 
for  we  were  scheduled  to  give  a  performance 
that  same  night  in  one  of  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.  huts 
on  the  edge  of  the  town.  When  one  of  the 
young  women  of  the  company  ventured  a  criti- 
cism of  her  room  the  tired  proprietress  ex- 
plained in  rapid-fire  French  that  we  were  for- 
tunate to  get  any  rooms  at  all  since  no  less  a 
personage  than  a  General  had  been  obliged  to 
sleep  on  a  park  bench  the  night  before  with  his 
men  around  him  on  the  ground. 

My  room  was  amusing  in  its  outlook.  From 
my  window  I  looked  down  upon  the  back 
court  of  the  hotel,  with  the  old  fashioned  pump 
and  stone  laundry  basins,  plump-armed  French 
maids  preparing  the  vegetables  for  the  even- 
ing meal,  cats  and  mongrel  dogs  on  the  kitchen 
tables  or  under  them,  pigeons  pecking  at  what- 

[41] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

ever  they  could  find  on  the  tables  or  under 
them,  pigs  grunting  from  a  nearby  pen,  to 
remind  the  proprietor  that  it  was  also  their 
supper  time,  guests  calling  in  bad  French  from 
their  windows  to  the  servants  in  the  court- 
yard below — in  short,  a  typical  French  small 
town  hotel,  and  back  of  this  domestic  scene  of 
disorder  and  confusion  a  picturesque  vine  cov- 
ered arch  of  heavy  masonry  through  which  one 
caught  a  vista  of  winding  moss-grown  steps 
and  tangled  garden  that  the  greatest  water 
colour  artist  of  them  all  might  have  been  de- 
lighted to  paint.  France !  "La  belle  France  1" 

Before  our  hats  were  even  off  Isaac  Marcos- 
son  burst  into  the  room,  fresh  from  the  front 
and  on  his  way  up  the  street  to  the  barracks 
now  occupied  by  General  Pershing  and  his 
staff  and  known  by  the  boys  as  G.  H.  Q. 

I  had  never  before  kissed  Isaac  Marcosson 
but  in  the  excitement  of  the  moment  I  did  so 
now.  I  am  inclined  to  think  that  Mary  Young 
who  was  with  me  also  kissed  him.  She  had 
stopped  off  at  G.  H.  Q.  to  see  our  perform- 
ance before  going  on  into  Joan  of  Arc's  coun- 
try to  resume  the  playing  of  "Baby  Mine" 
while  she  rehearsed  in  the  forthcoming  pageant 
[42] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

of  "Joan"  in  which  she  was  to  play  the  maid 
herself. 

In  a  few  moments  Mary,  Isaac  Marcosson 
and  I  were  curled  up  on  the  foot  of  the  high 
French  bed,  the  only  comfortable  place  in  the 
room  to  sit,  eating  from  a  tin  of  chocolates  that 
he  had  bought  at  a  Northern  canteen  and  remi- 
niscing about  our  last  meeting  at  Carnegie 
Hall  in  New  York  just  after  he  had  delivered 
his  maiden  lecture,  and  here  we  were  such  a 
short  time  afterward  in  such  a  strange  place 
under  such  different  conditions  and  he,  in  the 
meantime  had  seen  three  battle  fronts.  He 
touched  upon  a  few  of  the  high  points  and 
humorous  incidents  of  his  latest  experiences 
with  the  rapidity  of  which  he  alone  is  master 
and  went  on  his  way  with  a  promise  to  see  us 
later  that  evening. 

When  we  reached  the  hut  where  we  were  to 
play  that  night  we  found  it  so  packed  that  we 
could  scarcely  force  our  way  through  to  get 
back  of  the  stage  and  the  green  silesia  curtains 
that  had  been  provided  for  us.  Bodies  hung 
through  the  windows,  heads  protruded  from 
the  skylights  and  although  we  were  early  we 
were  told  that  our  audience  had  been  in  its 

[43] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

seats,  eager  for  good  places,  for  as  much  as  two 
hours  before  our  arrival. 

We  gave  our  best  and  from  the  cheers  that 
came  back  from  the  boys  and  the  invitations  to 
stay  with  them  forever,  they  evidently  found 
our  best  good  enough  for  them.  It  was  a  won- 
derful night,  or  so  it  seemed  to  us.  Generals, 
Colonels,  Majors  and  Lieutenants  also  thanked 
us  and  assured  us  that  we  had  given  them  and 
their  men  the  best  show  they  had  seen  since 
they  left  America.  The  officers  were  not  sup- 
posed to  attend  this  performance  as  we  were 
to  give  a  special  performance  for  them  later 
in  the  week  but  several  of  them  had  "slipped 
in"  as  they  put  it,  and  some  of  them  remained 
for  a  cup  of  chocolate  and  an  American  dough- 
nut with  us  in  the  back  office  of  the  "Y"  hut, 
where  the  hostess  and  the  secretary  of  the  hut 
had  graciously  prepared  a  little  supper  for  us. 

When  we  got  back  to  the  hotel  who  should 
emerge  out  of  the  darkness  of  the  court  but 
Arthur  Rulil  who  had  been  waiting  for  our  re- 
turn. He  too  was  down  from  the  Front,  hav- 
ing just  finished  some  new  work  for  Colliers 
which  he  had  managed  to  get  "passed"  by  the 
censor  that  afternoon.  The  only  thing  that 
[44] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

prevented  him  from  being  completely  happy 
was  the  prospect  of  having  to  sleep  in  the  hotel 
bath  tub  that  night,  a  fate  that  frequently 
overtakes  late  arrivals.  He  was  rescued  later, 
however,  by  Charles  Edward  Kloeber,  one  of 
America's  most  picturesque  war  correspon- 
dents and  general  war  time  pet. 

And  so  the  hello's  and  good-byes  continued 
from  early  morning  until  late  at  night.  The 
next  day  at  luncheon  I  met  a  fashionable  West- 
chester  woman  whose  country  place  I  had 
passed,  near  mine,  for  years.  She  was  wear- 
ing a  Red  Cross  uniform  and  her  husband,  one 
of  the  brainiest  men  in  New  York  State,  was 
serving  on  General  Pershing's  staff.  She  and 
I  had  never  known  each  other  at  home  but  by 
the  time  we  rose  from  the  luncheon  table  we 
were  fast  friends. 

The  first  few  days  at  G.  H.  Q.  will  always 
seem  like  a  glimpse  of  fairy  land  to  me,  the 
sunlit  court  of  our  funny  hotel  with  excited 
French  waitresses  screaming  at  generals  and 
privates  alike,  the  gay  little  groups  around  the 
dirty,  iron  tables,  war  correspondents,  staff  of- 
ficers, and  all  sorts  of  birds  of  passage,  the 

[45] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

quaint  winding  streets  with  huge  dust-covered 
military  trucks  dashing  through  them,  the 
guard  mount,  each  morning;  the  wonderful 
marine  band  organised  by  Damrosch  himself  at 
the  time  of  his  last  visit  to  see  General  Per- 
shing,  the  hours  I  stole  for  dreaming  in  a  still, 
secluded  garden  back  of  the  old  bastille  that 
looked  down  hundreds  of  feet  upon  a  beautiful 
valley  dotted  with  fields,  homes,  flower-strewn 
gardens  and  hemmed  in  on  the  other  side  by 
low-lying  hills  over  which  the  broad  white  road 
made  its  way  toward  Paris — a  valley  through 
which  Caesar  himself  had  fought,  and  on  the 
other  side  of  the  town  from  a  high  bluff  an- 
other view  even  more  lovely  of  a  lazy,  poplar 
edged  canal  winding  in  and  out  through  a 
still  green  meadow,  a  stream  having  broken 
from  its  banks  and  run  wilfully  away  in  an  op- 
posite direction,  children  of  the  peasants  wad- 
ing in  the  stream,  cattle  grazing  by  its  side, 
a  white  road  winding  out  of  sight  up  the  val- 
ley toward  a  famous  old  chateau  where  no  less 
a  personage  than  General  Pershing  himself 
was  housed,  and  all  this  within  ear-shot  of  the 
shrill  whistle  of  French  locomotives  bearing 
troops  back  and  forward  from  the  front  line 
[46] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

trenches  and  not  infrequently  German  prison- 
ers. It  was  a  rare  sight  to  see  a  real  troop  train 
come  home  laden  with  all  the  paraphernalia  of 
war,  men  lounging  about  in  the  flat  cars  or 
hanging  their  feet  out  of  the  open  doorways 
while  they  played  cards  or  checkers,  horses  and 
straw  and  fighting  apparatus  all  piled  in  to- 
gether and  one  day  a  curious  sight  came  by — 
an  entire  train  load  of  German  prisoners 
guarded  only  by  wounded  French  soldiers. 
These  were  glimpses  one  caught  of  what  was 
going  on  further  up  the  line,  but  the  sunshine 
and  the  laughter  seemed  at  first  to  make  all  the 
pain  of  it  unreal.  Then,  too,  the  first  camps 
that  we  played  differed  so  much  in  avocation 
and  personelle  that  we  were  constantly  excit- 
ed by  surprises.  At  the  Gas  School  where 
deadly  and  important  experiments  are  made 
we  dined  at  the  officers*  mess  which  was  served 
in  what  looked  like  an  iron-lined  hogshead.  I 
pricked  up  my  ears  when  I  heard  one  of  the 
men  say  he  had  to  be  up  early  in  the  morning 
to  "shoot  dogs."  He  explained  to  me  later 
that  it  is  necessary  for  them  to  shoot  poison- 
ous gases  into  the  lungs  of  the  dogs,  rabbits 
and  even  snails  to  discover  ways  of  combating 

[47] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

their  effect.  He  told  me,  too,  of  the  experiments 
being  made  by  injecting  certain  fluids  or  gela- 
tins in  the  horses'  hoofs  and  sealing  them  up 
there  to  protect  the  beasts  from  the  poisoned 
earth  where  deadly  gases  have  been  used. 

Dogs  are  procured  from  the  neighbouring 
villages  or  shipped  up  from  Paris  by  the  car 
load.  I  began  to  wonder  if  the  improved  con- 
dition I  had  noticed  amongst  the  Paris  cab 
horses  meant  only  that  the  fittest  were  spared 
from  experimentation.  "C'est  la  guerre." 

On  our  way  out  from  the  camp  that  night 
a  soldier  jumped  on  the  running  board  of  our 
car  as  we  passed  one  of  the  sentry  posts,  re- 
fused to  accept  our  countersign  and  ordered 
our  chauffeur  to  take  us  to  the  guard-house. 
We  were  haled  before  a  sleepy-looking  officer 
who  pronounced  us  suspicious  characters,  said 
he  had  heard  of  no  entertainment  being  per- 
mitted that  night  in  the  camp  and  gave  orders 
that  we  be  locked  up  for  trial  in  the  morning. 
Tommy  Gray,  one  of  our  players  produced  his 
false  whiskers  and  other  stage  "props"  in  sup- 
port of  his  contention  that  he  was  a  mere  actor, 
Will  Morrisey  offered  to  play  his  violin  to 
[48] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

prove  that  he  was  an  ^entertainer,"  Lois  Mere- 
dith, our  ingenue  went  into  giggling  hysterics 
to  prove  her  right  to  the  title,  Elizabeth  Brill 
our  leading  chanteuse  became  properly  tem- 
peramental and  I  argued  as  calmly  as  my  bad 
disposition  would  permit,  but  all  to  no  avail,  we 
were  about  to  be  led  forth  to  a  night  of  tor- 
ture when  a  captain  who  had  been  chief  host 
at  the  supper  after  the  performance  appeared 
in  the  doorway  and  "gave  us  the  laugh"  and  we 
realised  for  the  first  time  that  we  had  been  the 
victims  of  a  clever  practical  joke.  The  story 
went  the  rounds  of  headquarters  the  next  day 
and  for  some  reason  or  other  seemed  to  add  to 
our  popularity. 

Of  course  it  made  confirmed  sceptics  of  us 
and  a  few  nights  later  when  one  of  the  boys 
brought  in  a  small  German  balloon  that  had 
fallen  near  the  tent  in  which  we  were  playing 
we  refused  at  first  to  even  approach  it  for  in- 
spection for  we  thought  they  had  concealed 
some  explosive  inside  of  it. 

From  the  Gas  Camp  we  were  taken  to  the 
wood  choppers'  camp  where  hundreds  of 
sturdy  Americans,  many  of  them  engineers, 
were  engaged  night  and  day  in  cutting  down 

[49] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

and  transporting  to  headquarters  a  forest  in 
which  Marie  Antoinette  had  once  played. 
Winter  was  coming  on  and  it  was  necessary  to 
work  fast  before  the  snows  came,  though  even 
the  snow  would  not  stop  them,  so  they  said. 
To  get  to  this  camp  we  abandoned  our  big 
army  Renault  for  the  first  time  and  took  to 
Ford  cars  for  the  roads  were  thought  difficult. 
They  would  not  seem  so  to  the  average  Ameri- 
can. We  were  rather  relieved  to  lose  the  Re- 
nault for  with  it  we  lost  Conde,  the  speed  fiend, 
who  had  been  driving  us  up  and  down  hill  at 
sixty  miles  an  hour  and  barely  touching  the 
earth,  when  we  reached  a  level  stretch  of  road. 
When  we  ventured  a  protest  he  reminded  us 
that  he  had  been  the  favourite  driver  of  the  late 
President  of  France  and  had  also  driven  in  the 
automobile  races  in  New  York.  In  his  opinion 
this  evidently  made  him  immune  from  acci- 
dent and  criticism.  One  night  when  we  were 
irritated  into  being  very  sharp  with  him  he  ad- 
mitted that  he  had  been  driving  fast  out  of 
temper  because  three  bees  had  "bited"  him  that 
day.  Later  on  when  I  offered  him  ten  francs 
to  soothe  his  ruffled  feelings  he  drew  himself  up 
proudly  and  reminded  me  that  he  was  a  soldier 
[50] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

in  the  Army.  When  I  confessed  my  faux  pas 
to  a  millionaire  American  that  night  he  told 
me  that  he'd  made  a  fool  of  himself  by  trying 
to  tip  a  chauffeur  that  had  been  loaned  to  him 
from  the  Army  Transportation  Department 
and  had  discovered  that  the  chauffeur  was 
President  of  a  company  at  home  in  which  he 
merely  owned  stock  and  the  chauffeur  had 
twice  as  much  money  as  he  had.  Such  awk- 
ward situations  as  these  leave  one  entirely  at 
the  mercy  of  one's  driver  over  here  and  when 
we  got  into  the  dark  woods  I  was  thankful  that 
Coride  was  not  at  the  wheel.  Oh,  those  de- 
licious woods,  the  smell  of  smoke  from  burn- 
ing autumn  leaves!  We  picked  up  a  doctor 
,who  was  walking  to  a  camp  beyond  ours  to  see 
some  negro  boys.  He  too  was  rejoicing  in  the 
clean  fresh  odour  of  the  woods.  What  a  re- 
lief after  the  smelly  courtyards  of  the  French 
hotels.  He  said  France  had  knocked  his  germ 
theories  all  hollow  for  if  there  were  anything  in 
germs  all  France  would  have  been  dead  long 
ago. 

As  usual  we  found  our  audience  had  been 
waiting  for  us  long  before  the  appointed  time. 
They  were  a  fine  looking  lot  of  young  "hus- 

[51] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

kies"  and  how  they  did  laugh  at  the  show  and 
how  they  did  cheer,  lined  up  either  side  of  the 
wood  road,  as  we  called  our  good-byes  to  them 
and  their  camp  fires. 

The  next  night  was  "negro  camp  night"  and 
I've  never  seen  so  many  square  feet  of  white 
teeth  before  nor  since.  The  Commander  told 
me  that  he  had  four  companies  of  these  boys 
when  he  landed  and  he  loved  them.  He'd  lost 
a  great  many  of  them  because  they  were  un- 
able to  endure  the  damp  and  the  cold  and  two 
of  his  companies  had  been  detailed  at  South- 
ern pyorts  to  work  on  the  new  American-made 
docks.  We  had  seen  one  of  these  docks  before 
landing  at  Bordeaux  and  the  brave  fearless 
way  in  which  it  juts  out  to  meet  in-coming 
ships  is  guaranteed  to  thrill  even  the  dullest 
edged  American. 

I  could  imagine  these  black  good  natured 
faces  in  front  of  me  much  more  habitually  gay 
down  on  the  Southern  docks  than  way  up  here 
in  the  north  preparing  to  go  "over  the  top"  to 
what  they  call  a  "good  mornin'  Jesus."  They 
had  forgotten  their  troubles  for  the  moment 
however,  and  so  had  General  du  Pont  in  the 
front  row  and  Major  Wills,  the  Paymaster 
[52] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

of  the  Marine  Corps,  and  the  Chief  Censor  of 
the  War  Correspondents  and  several  other 
friends  who  had  stopped  in  at  our  hotel  to  see 
us  on  their  way  down  to  Paris  and  decided  to 
attach  themselves  to  our  party  for  the  evening 
to  "hear  the  coons  laugh."  And  how  those 
boys  did  laugh,  and  those  teeth! 

When  our  show  was  over  the  boys  volun- 
teered a  return  entertainment  and  with  their 
Commander's  permission  they  hopped  onto  the 
stage  and  did  some  wonderful  buck  dancing 
and  when  we  all  piled  into  our  cars  and  headed 
back  for  G.  H.  Q.  our  chief  comedian  again 
declared  that  it  was  the  best  war  he  had  ever 
attended. 

The  next  night  we  left  our  hotel  early  and 
drove,  or  rather  flew,  for  Conde  was  with  us 
again,  over  miles  of  beautiful  rolling  hills  to 
the  Ordnance  Camp.  We  were  to  have  mess 
with  the  officers  and  give  a  show  for  them  after- 
ward. This  function  seemed  to  take  on  more 
dignity  than  any  of  the  others,  perhaps  be- 
cause we  were  made  serious  before  dinner  by 
being  shown  through  the  laboratory  and  the 
class  and  experimental  rooms  where  row  upon 

[53] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

row  of  hellish  contrivances  for  killing  were  on 
exhibition,  some  of  them  of  our  own  invention, 
some  of  them  souvenirs  from  the  enemy.  It 
was  the  first  time  that  I  had  known  that  pow- 
der comes  in  hard  brittle  sticks,  some  of  it  looks 
and  feels  almost  exactly  like  uncooked  spa- 
ghetti or  macaroni.  We  were  afterward  told 
that  the  young  captain  who  explained  the 
mechanism  of  some  of  the  more  deadly  bombs, 
was  a  very  great  genius  and  had  just  made  a 
discovery  of  great  importance.  He  had  the 
clear  blue,  far-seeing  eyes  of  a  genius  and 
looked  like  the  sort  of  young  man  the  world 
needs. 

After  the  "show,"  as  we  call  it,  we  found 
that  some  of  the  officers  who  were  billeted  in  a 
town  below,  through  which  we  must  pass,  had 
prepared  a  supper  for  us  in  the  village  tavern, 
and  were  determined  to  way-lay  us.  They  did 
so  and  when  I  looked  round  the  long,  narrow, 
dingy  walled  room  lit  by  a  few  sputtering 
candles  and  surveyed  the  picturesque,  incon- 
gruous party  at  the  long  table,  the  blue  of  an 
occasional  French  uniform  off-setting  the  kha- 
ki of  our  boys,  a  chaplain  whom  we  had  picked 
up  on  the  way,  the  gay  tinsel  and  chiffon  of 

[54] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

our  gowns,  and  over  it  all  the  haze  of  cigarette 
smoke  and  through  the  hum  of  voices  the  pop- 
ping of  champagne  corks  from  bottles  of  which 
the  women  did  not  partake,  a  little  song,  much 
laughter,  it  looked  like  a  scene  from  Fran£ois 
Villon,  and  I  felt  that  life  was  being  made 
much  too  easy  and  too  picturesque  for  us,  but 
the  very  next  day  we  got  our  first  introduction 
to  the  more  serious  side  of  it  all.  When  we 
came  down  for  breakfast  in  the  court  we  found 
the  place  almost  deserted,  I  looked  at  my 
watch  thinking  that  I  was  later  than  usual. 
On  the  contrary  I  was  earlier.  I  asked  one  of 
the  habitues  of  the  place  what  had  become  of 
everybody — meaning  more  especially  the  war 
correspondents,  journalists,  and  staff  officials. 

He  said  that  every  one  was  up  at  G.  H.  Q. 
and  I  thought  he  looked  rather  sinister 
about  it. 

A  little  later  I  heard  a  young  lieutenant  at 
the  next  table  say  that  thousands  of  troops  had 
passed  through  the  village  during  the  night  on 
their  way  to  the  front. 

I  went  for  a  walk  and  was  amazed  to  see 
how  many  grey  camions  had  suddenly  stolen 
into  the  streets  as  from  nowhere. 

[55] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

At  luncheon  when  the  men  returned  from 
G.  H.  Q.  there  was  a  silent  expectant  some- 
thing in  the  air  and  a  constraint  about  discuss- 
ing something  that  every  one  apparently  felt 
rather  than  knew. 

Later  as  we  got  more  familiar  with  the  tra- 
ditions of  war  we  came  to  know  that  this  sud- 
den suspension  of  social  candour — this  tighten- 
ing of  the  moral  fibre,  always  precedes  the  dec- 
laration of  each  big  "offensive"  and  until  the 
big  guns  are  actually  firing  and  the  knowledge 
of  the  manoeuvre  has  become  common  prop- 
erty one  has  a  feeling  of  being  suspended  in 
space  awaiting  some  unavoidable  cataclysm 
and  not  being  permitted  to  discuss  one's  fore- 
bodings with  one's  neighbour. 

So  impossible  is  it  to  determine  the  extent  of 
an  "offensive"  at  its  inception  that  it  is  only 
on  looking  back  upon  it  that  history  is  able  to 
label  it  in  relation  to  its  most  salient  point. 
This  movement  was  to  be  known  in  history  as 
the  "Saint  Mihiel  Drive." 

We  knew  nothing  of  all  this  however  when 
we  were  loaded  into  the  car  after  luncheon,  to 
"show"  in  our  first  hospital.     It  was  a  base 
[56] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

hospital  on  the  edge  of  the  town.  Even  yet  I 
don't  feel  like  writing  about  it.  111  never  get 
away  from  the  consciousness  of  that  side  of 
war  again  no  matter  how  funny  the  stories 
round  the  supper  table.  No  matter  how  bright 
the  morning  sunshine,  there  will  always  be 
that  dark,  gaping,  subterranean  passage  under- 
neath all  the  flow  of  chatter  and  chaff  and 
art.  Of  all  the  hungry  disappointed  eyes  that 
looked  out  from  those  grey  coverlets,  eyes  nar- 
rowed by  pain,  I  think  the  childlike  eyes  of  the 
dumb,  puzzled  negroes  will  haunt  me  longest. 
They  made  me  think  of  wounded  animals  who 
had  never  harmed  any  one  and  who  could  only 
wonder  at  their  fate. 

On  our  way  home  we  passed  several  lines  of 
great  dust-covered  camions  on  their  way  to- 
ward "the  front"  and  when  we  got  back  to  the 
hotel  we  found  what  we  called  our  "camp  fol- 
lowers" waiting  in  the  court  for  us,  young 
lieutenants  who  had  attached  themselves  to 
our  party  without  consulting  us,  who  insisted 
upon  carrying  our  coats  and  usually  ended  by 
losing  them,  who  frisked  about  like  gay  young 
puppies  regardless  of  what  mood  one  might  be 
in.  I  was  tired  and  longed  to  get  to  my  room 

[57] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

and  I  said  irritably  to  one  of  our  unit  that  I 
wished  we  could  lose  the  infants  for  a  while. 

I  had  occasion  to  regret  that  remark  the 
very  next  afternoon  and  I  shall  always  re- 
member it  with  shame.  When  we  came  out 
from  luncheon  there  were  our  "Newfoundland 
pups"  as  usual  in  the  court  but  their  faces  were 
grave  and  their  smiles  a  little  forced  and  their 
"roll-ups"  were  slung  across  their  shoulders. 
They'd  been  suddenly  called  "to  the  front." 

We  knew  what  that  meant.  The  white  faces 
of  those  poor  boys  in  the  hospital  yesterday 
rose  between  me  and  the  red-cheeked  youths 
who  stood  before  us  now.  They  held  out  their 
hands  one  by  one,  each  with  some  message  to 
the  girl  he  had  left  behind  in  the  States.  And 
right  here  I  want  to  make  my  first  criticism  of 
Uncle  Sam  even  though  I  may  be  hanged  for 
it.  If  he  could  know  how  his  boys  over  here 
have  lost  confidence  in  both  his  conscience  and 
his  ability  to  deliver  their  messages  to  their 
loved  ones  at  home  he  would  be  sorry. 

"It's  pretty  tough,"  so  one  of  them  put  it, 
"when  you're  'going  over  the  top'  to  feel  you 
can't  even  get  a  last  word  back  to  your  girl." 

He  showed  me  the  picture  of  his  girl,  young 
[58] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

brave,  sweet  and  trusting.  She  was  sitting  out- 
side a  lonely  looking  shack  in  North  Dakota. 
She  seemed  to  be  looking  out  over  the  plains 
for  the  return  of  "her  boy." 

The  boy  told  me  how  he  had  written  to  her 
every  single  day  since  he  left,  nearly  nine 
months  ago,  and  how  he  had  received  a  letter 
from  her  only  yesterday  saying  that  she  had 
had  only  four  letters  from  him  since  his  depar- 
ture. He  had  figured  out  that  according  to 
that  average,  it  would  mean  that  more  than  two 
hundred  and  fifty  ships  must  have  been  sunk 
each  bearing  a  letter  from  him.  This  of  course 
was  impossible,  so  what  had  they  done  with  his 
letters?  "Dumped  them  into  the  sea,"  was  his 
conclusion,  "It  saves  trouble."  I'm  sorry  to 
say  that  is  the  cynical  conclusion  of  many  of 
the  boys  over  here.  I  suggested  to  this  chap 
that  he  might  have  written  things  that  the  cen- 
sor couldn't  pass.  "No  chance,"  he  answered. 
"The  first  thing  a  fellow  gets  in  his  head  over 
here  is  that  all  he  can  write  home  is  "well  and 
love"  and,  then,  half  a  dozen  other  guys  have 
to  read  it  before  it  gets  a  fair  start,  but  some  of 
us  boys  would  like  to  get  even  that  much  back 
if  we  could,  but  I  guess  there's  not  much 

[59] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

chance  of  my  girl  getting  a  last  message  from 
me  unless  one  of  you  folks  run  across  her." 

I  took  her  name  and  had  another  look  at  the 
dreamy  face  in  the  photograph,  that  sublime 
line  of  Masefield's  came  back  to  me, — "Each 
man  follows  his  Helen  with  her  gift  of  grief." 
How  many  of  these  men  would  return  to  their 
Helens? 

All  the  voices  became  blurred  now  in  a 
general  buzz  of  good-byes,  there  was  a  genial 
reaching  out  of  hands  and  meeting  of  eyes  that 
said  only  too  plainly  that  they  knew  it  might 
be  for  the  last  time.  I  couldn't  speak  and  I 
knew  it  would  not  be  considered  sporty  of  me 
to  cry.  I  just  held  out  my  hand  and  nodded, 
and  oh,  the  ache  in  my  throat !  It  was  my  first 
necessity  for  keeping  a  stiff  upper  lip  and  I 
wondered  how  mothers  and  sisters  and  sweet- 
hearts live  through  such  hours  without  break- 
ing the  courage  of  their  men  when  I  could  suf- 
fer so  about  men  who,  a  moment  before,  had 
been  only  a  nuisance  to  me.  The  mothers  and 
sweethearts  of  these  boys  would  have  been 
proud  if  they  could  have  seen  them  turning 
their  faces  to  the  front  that  day,  each  eager  to 
"go  over  the  top."  They  were  a  brave  looking 
[60] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

lot,  God  grant  we  may  see  them  again  in 
America  as  whole  in  mind  and  body  as  then. 

At  eight  the  next  morning  the  speed  maniac, 
Conde,  was  waiting  in  his  big  Renault  to  take 
us  away  from  G.  H.  Q.  to  what  and  where? 
We  had  been  told  the  name  of  our  next  head- 
quarters but  it  meant  little  to  us.  We  knew 
only  that  it  was  in  the  "advanced  zone." 


[61]' 


PART  II:    THE  ADVANCED  ZONE 

In  the  Argonne 
Wednesday  night, 
11:15 

Sept.  25,  1918. 

Within  a  few  miles  of  us  the  greatest  battle 
in  history  is  just  starting.  Big  guns  are  thun- 
dering, the  lights  are  flashing  across  No  Man's 
Land,  and  air  ships  are  buzzing  overhead  in 
the  starlight  and  yet  I  am  able  to  turn  my 
back  upon  this  and  a  golden  moon  and  sit  here 
in  a  tiny  barracks  room  on  the  head  of  one  of 
the  three  cots  upon  which  I  and  two  of  the 
other  players  sleep,  and  write;  for  it  is  all  so 
wonderful  that  one  feels  an  impulse  to  share 
it  with  those  who  are  not  here,  even  while 
everything  tempts  one  outside. 

Day  after  day,  night  after  night,  camions 
have  streamed  along  "The  Sacred  Road" — 
which  is  what  the  French  call  the  broad  white 
highway  from  Bar-le-duc  to  Verdun — infan- 

[62] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

try,  cavalry,  machine  guns,  tanks,  one  endless 
procession  manned  by  Americans,  French, 
Singalese,  Amanites,  Chinese,  African  negroes 
and  American  negroes — a  line  broken  here  and 
there  by  the  pompous,  cars  of  high  officials, 
French  or  American,  ministers  of  state,  and 
generals.  And  back  and  forth  on  the  newly 
laid  American  railroad  tracks  at  the  foot  of  the 
hill  on  which  we  are  now  billeted  large  Ameri- 
can engines  have  been  bearing  hither  and 
thither  for  days  heavy  artillery,  gasoline,  pro- 
visions and  ammunition  and  sections  of  port- 
able houses  and  long  sections  of  empty  Red 
Cross  hospital  cars.  To-morrow  these  cars 
with  the  big  red  crosses  painted  on  their  sides 
will  come  back  from  the  front — but  not  empty. 
Many  of  them  will  bear  back  to  the  waiting 
nurses  behind  the  lines  some  of  the  boys  that 
we  have  seen  staggering  along  "The  Sacred 
Road"  these  past  few  nights,  exhausted  by  long 
marches  and  the  sixty  pound  packs  on  their 
backs — boys  who  were  so  weary  that  when  the 
occasional  order  came  to  halt  they  would  sink 
back  in  the  roadway  too  tired  to  drag  them- 
selves to  one  side  or  to  even  remove  their  packs, 
and  too  numb  to  care  for  the  huge  camions  that 

[63] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

whizzed  by  so  close  to  them  that  we,  watching, 
feared  for  their  lives.  The  surgeon  who  stood 
by  my  side  explained  to  me  that  when  one  of 
these  boys  could  no  longer  keep  up  with  his 
comrades  he  was  divested  of  his  pack  and  con- 
sidered good  for  six  more  miles.  If  he  could 
then  stagger  no  further  he  was  allowed  to  drop 
out  until  he  was  treated — his  feet  were  bathed 
and  protectors  put  over  the  blisters  and  then  a 
man  who  would  ordinarily  be  told  to  stay  in 
bed  for  days — was  shoved  back  into  the  march 
and  told  to  catch  up  with  his  regiment — "and 
many  of  these  chaps"  he  said  "are  college  boys 
or  mother's  pets,  tenderly  reared."  I  looked  at 
the  ones*who  lay  before  me  along  the  roadside 
— in  the  mud  or  on  the  wet  earth.  "That  boy 
over  there,"  I  said  to  the  Doctor,  "looks  as 
though  he  were  dead.  Let's  speak  to  him." 
The  doctor  shook  his  head.  "He's  still  alive 
but  he's  too  tired  to  answer,"  he  said.  "He 
wants  only  to  be  left  alone — they  all  do." 

We  walked  on  up  the  road,  past  what  seemed 
miles  of  these  same  mute  listless  figures.  Some- 
times the  order  would  come  to  march  and  they 
would  stagger  to  their  feet  and  move  on — 
[64] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

still  without  even  a  murmur.    "Boots!  boots! 
boots!"  Kipling  knew. 

The  surgeon  who  walked  by  my  side  was  a 
wealthy  southerner  who  had  been  requested  by 
the  Government  to  accept  the  direction  of  a 
large  corps  of  surgeons  and  Red  Cross  workers. 
He  had  three  homes  in  America,  a  devoted 
family  and  a  large  practice  and  yet  he  was  glad 
to  sacrifice  all  these,  and  more,  to  sleep  on  a 
hard  cot  in  an  advanced  war  zone,  if  he  was 
fortunate  enough  to  be  spared  for  a  few  hours 
to  sleep,  and  he  pretended  that  he  liked  "corn 
;willie."  His  big,  heavy  voice  grew  very  ten- 
der when  he  spoke  of  his  doughboys  and  yet  he 
told  me  quite  calmly  while  we  stood  under  a 
wayside  cross,  bearing  the  drooping  figure  of 
the  Christ — a  cross  surrounded  by  pines  and 
marking  one  of  the  bloodiest  cross-ways  in 
France,  he  told  me  that  his  first  duty  and  any 
surgeon's  first  duty  on  the  battlefield  is  to 
treat  first  the  men  who  need  treatment  least, 
for  these  can  be  made  to  quickly  fight  again 
while  the  more  fatally  wounded  are  only  a  drag 
on  the  army  and  are  to  be  treated  only  out  of 
compassion  after  the  more  fortunate  ones  have 
been  put  on  their  feet.  A  few  moments  later 

[65] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

this  same  big  fellow  gave  to  a  tired  doughboy 
his  last  cigarette — the  cigarette  he  had  been 
treasuring  to  smoke  on  his  way  home.  "C'est 
la  guerre,"  he  said  when  I  smiled  at  his  tender 
action  so  in  contrast  to  the  harsh  principles  of 
procedure  that  he  had  just  outlined. 

"C'est  la  guerre — C'est  la  guerre!"  Every- 
where from  every  one  on  every  side  one  hears 
it.  It  comes  rumbling  back  to  me  now  from 
the  first  night  when  we  pressed  into  the  "ad- 
vanced zone."  But  that  night  it  was  said  mer- 
rily almost  in  a  spirit  of  derision  for  we  were 
dining  in  a  famous  old  chateau — one  in  which 
General  Joffre  had  lived  during  the  battle  of 
the  Marne  and  in  which  Napoleon  was  said  to 
have  taken  refuge  when  he  was  trying  to  es- 
cape capture.  The  wine  which  we  were  enjoy- 
ing had  been  poured  from  bottles  whose  corks 
were  mildewed  from  long  storage  in  the  vaults 
of  the  chateau — a  late  September  sun  was 
dancing  in  and  out  between  the  branches  of  the 
trees  and  the  shadows  lay  gently  on  the  long 
peaceful  lawn  and  some  of  our  players  were 
dancing  on  the  terrace  to  the  strains  of  the 
band  that  had  come  to  serenade  us  before  as- 
sisting in  the  entertainment  which  we  were 
[66] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

about  to  give  in  the  eleventh  century  stable 
which  had  been  lighted  by  candles  and  decorat- 
ed with  flags  for  our  performance. 

Life  seemed  very  idyllic  and  gay  this  night 
and  death  very  far  away,  and  yet  the  next 
morning  these  same  officers  would  be  leading 
their  men  in  sham  battle  to  prepare  them  for 
their  part  in  the  great  death  struggle  that  was 
bound  to  come  soon  to  many  of  them.  It  came 
sooner  than  we  expected  and  the  next  day  we 
were  ordered  to  "double  up"  on  our  perform- 
ances and  play  our  four  days'  schedule  in  that 
region  in  two  days  as  the  entire  division  of 
forty  thousand  or  more  was  to  move  forward 
to  relieve  another  division  that  was  going  im- 
mediately to  the  front.  We  watched  many  of 
them  get  under  way* — fine  stalwart  fellows, 
with  the  wild-cat  insignia  on  the  sleeves  of 
their  uniforms.  I  saw  their  handsome  General 
later  in  Paris  taking  his  first  "permission" 
since  the  war  and  it  was  amusing  to  watch  the 
admiring  glances  of  the  French  girls  change 
into  slightly  shocked  expressions  as  they  be- 
held the  black  cat  on  his  sleeve  which  to  them 
suggests  a  very  questionable  vocation. 

While  these  forty  thousand  "Wild  Cats" 
[67] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

were  moving  forward  we  were  called  back  to 
Paris  fo  be  fitted  with  gas  masks,  iron  helmets, 
"roll  ups,"  cots,  and  blankets  before  proceed- 
ing yet  further  into  the  advanced  zone. 

On  our  way  to  Paris  we  stopped  for  lunch- 
eon at  Chaumont,  G.  H.  Q,  and  here  we  found 
many  old  friends  and  got  our  first  word  of  the 
American  victory  at  St.  Mihiel  and  two  men 
who  had  been  in  the  action  the  night  before 
told  us  how  the  old  men  and  women  in  the  re- 
gained territory  who  had  thought  France  lost 
to  them  forever  had  thrown  their  arms  about 
the  knees  of  the  on-marching  Americans  and 
kissed  their  feet  and  wept.  How  also  that  not 
one  woman  in  all  that  newly  conquered  area 
had  been  left  undefiled  by  their  late  German 
conquerors  and  how  all  the  young  girls  had 
been  carried  away  by  the  now  retreating  Ger- 
mans. 

When  we  reached  Paris  that  night  it  was  in 
time  to  experience  the  first  air  raid  that  Paris 
had  seen  in  a  month  and  one  of  the  heaviest 
raids  it  had  ever  seen — and  as  history  has  since 
proven,  the  last . 

It  came  just  as  I  had  tucked  myself  in  for 
[68] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

the  night.  My  first  thought  was  that  I  was 
utterly  alone  and  I  was  a  little  sorry  for  my- 
self. I  wished  that  I  knew  some  one  to  whom 
I  could  go  to  get  "snuggled  up."  Not  know- 
ing any  such  person  and  not  even  remember- 
ing on  what  floor  to  find  any  of  the  other  mem- 
bers of  the  company  I  lay  quite  still  and  wait- 
ed. There  were  occasional  flashes  of  light  from 
the  barrage  firing  on  the  enemy  planes  and  the 
changing  direction  of  this  firing  caused  the 
sound  of  it  to  die  away  and  return  like  the  rum- 
ble of  thunder.  After  a  time  I  heard  voices 
in  the  corridor.  I  slipped  on  my  dressing  gown 
and  went  out.  Three  men  in  white  pyjamas 
were  standing  in  the  doorway  next  to  mine. 
They  asked  me  if  I  was  nervous  and  whether 
I  would  not  like  to  go  down  to  the  cellar.  I  re- 
plied that  I  was  a  fatalist  and  one  of  them 
laughed  and  called  that  a  good  idea.  I  went 
back  to  bed  and  with  the  barrage  still  thunder- 
ing and  dying  away  and  returning,  I  finally 
went  to  sleep. 

The  next  morning  I  learned  that  not  one  of 
our  company  had  taken  the  precaution  of  go- 
ing into  the  cellar  while  every  French  person  in 

[69] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

the  hotel  had  done  so.  This  was  explained  by 
an  old  American  resident  on  the  ground  that 
the  nerves  of  the  French  had  been  unsettled  by 
a  long  succession  of  raids,  while  to  us  a  raid 
was  still  in  the  nature  of  a  novelty. 

Armed  with  all  sorts  of  military  orders  the 
next  morning  we  set  out  on  our  quest  for  gas 
masks  and  helmets  and  had  our  first  lesson  in 
the  use  of  the  mask.  It  wasn't  a  very  cheery 
business.  The  fat  puffy  lieutenant  delegated 
to  instruct  us  seemed  very  bored  with  us  and 
we  thought  him  in  danger  of  apoplexy  from 
having  so  often  to  blow  up  his  cheeks  and  to 
hold  the  air  in  them  while  adjusting  his  experi- 
mental mask.  To  concentrate  our  attention  on 
the  business  in  hand,  and  on  himself,  he  told  us 
terrifying  stories  about  what  had  happened  to 
others  before  us  who  had  been  stupid  or  slow 
in  adjusting  their  masks  in  battles  and  he  re- 
peated the  old  saying  about  there  being  only 
two  kinds  of  men  where  gas  attacks  were  con- 
cerned— the  quick  and  the  dead. 

After  more  than  an  hour  of  this  exhausting 

drill   when   he   had   alternately   bullied   and 

coaxed  us  to  keep  pace  with  his  rapid  counting 

— and  when  each  woman  in  the  party  had  been 

[70] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

made  to  feel  that  her  hair  was  a  crime  against 
nature  because  it  would  get  entangled  in  the 
straps  of  her  mask  and  when  most  of  the  men 
had  decided  that  there  was  something  defective 
in  their  teeth,  nose,  ears  or  lungs — after  all  this 
boredom  the  young  instructor  swooped  down 
upon  Elizabeth  Brice  and  me  with  an  accusing 
eye,  thrust  his  fingers  under  the  edges  of  our 
masks  just  beneath  our  chins  and  thundered  at 
us  that  our  faces  were  too  small  for  our  masks. 
We  thought  it  would  have  been  more  gallant 
of  him  to  have  put  it  the  other  way  round  but 
we  were  too  cowed  and  exhausted  to  protest 
and  I  personally  felt  that  I  would  rather  be 
gassed  than  go  through  this  ordeal  again  and 
said  so. 

Again  I  was  properly  rebuked  and  informed 
that  the  army  was  not  concerned  with  my  pref- 
erence in  such  matters  and  that  we  would  not 
be  allowed  to  enter  the  danger  zone  until  our 
masks  did  fit  properly. 

Telephoning  followed  and  it  was  ascertained 
that  there  was  a  carload  of  new  masks — small 
sizes — on  the  way  from  Bordeaux  but  since  this 
car  was  in  charge  of  a  "Frog" — as  the  lieuten- 
ant put  it — there  was  no  telling  whether  the 

[71] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

masks  would  arrive  during  the  present  war. 
Anyway  we  could  call  the  next  morning  and 
see. 

This  was  rather  a  let  down  after  our  impa- 
tience to  get  off  to  "the  front"  and  we  were 
feeling  a  little  depressed  when  we  reached  the 
hotel. 

In  front  of  the  hotel  we  found  Senator  Hol- 
lis  waiting  with  a  friend  from  one  of  the  South- 
ern Encampments. 

The  Senator  suggested  that  we  join  them  for 
dinner  at  Montmartre.  We  were  tired  and 
ready  for  our  beds  but  we  remembered  that  the 
Senator  had  lost  his  only  boy  in  the  air  service 
less  than  a  week  ago  and  we  knew  that  we 
could  help  him  by  sharing  the  burden  of  enter- 
taining his  friend  and  also  by  trying  to  keep  his 
mind  off  his  loss. 

How  little  I  had  known  Montmartre  in  the 
old  days — the  days  when  I'd  dashed  up  the  hill 
in  the  wild  hours  of  the  night  in  a  cab  or  taxi 
with  a  lot  of  laughing  Americans  whose  only 
idea  was  to  use  Pigale's  and  the  Moulin  Rouge 
as  a  stopping  place  for  another  drink.  There 
were  no  cabs  nor  taxis  to  draw  us  up  the  hill 
to-night.  We  took  the  "Metro"  to  the  foot  of 

[72] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

the  mountain,  then  climbed  tier  upon  tier  of 
steep  stone  steps — stopping  at  every  landing 
to  look  down  on  Paris  as  we  had  never  seen  it 
before — Paris  lit  by  the  setting  sun  on  the  one 
side  and  the  rising  moon  on  the  other — dim, 
mysterious,  alluring  Paris.  I  loved  it  for 
the  first  time  in  my  life — and  I  knew  for  the 
first  time  the  lure  of  Montmartre — how  many 
lovers  had  climbed  these  steps  in  the  moonlight 
and  halted  at  each  landing  and  looked  down 
into  the  mist  and  then  into  each  other's  eyes. 
How  little  would  the  rich  tourist  ever  know  of 
the  real  Montmartre. 

When  we  reached  the  top  of  the  hill  and 
made  our  way  along  the  middle  of  the  street  on 
the  rough  cobble  stones,  we  passed  the  Cuckoo 
and  other  famous  little  cafes  made  so  by  hectic 
writers  and  we  stopped  outside  a  semi-out- 
door eating  place  from  which  we  could  look 
across  the  street  at  the  Sacre  Cceur.  The  seats 
were  all  taken  at  the  outdoor  tables  so  we  gave 
our  dinner  order  and  went  on  to  the  place  of 
the  Martyr  to  watch  the  afterglow  of  the  sun- 
set and  wait  our  turn  at  table. 

For  the  first  time  I  saw  the  statue  at  the  foot 
of  the  Cathedral — the  statue  of  the  Martyr  that 

[78] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

gave  the  mountain  its  name — the  statue  that 
has  looked  down  so  many  years  on  gay,  wicked, 
sorrowing  Paris. 

After  dinner  we  wandered  through  the 
crooked  narrow  streets  searching  for  the  old 
Moulin  Rouge.  We  were  told  it  had  been 
burned — probably  by  an  exploding  shell.  A 
little  further  on  we  passed  the  Black  Cat — it 
was  too  early  to  go  home — we  went  inside. 
Here  again  was  the  real  Montmartre.  A  funny, 
low  ceiling  vaultlike  room  with  plaster  walls 
daubed  with  cheap  drawings,  fine  etchings, 
nude  paintings,  charcoal  cartoons,  black  cats ; 
bits  of  red  and  white  plaid  gingham,  faded 
leaves,  shelves  containing  pewter  mugs,  brass 
bowls  and  all  sorts  of  discarded  bric-a-brac,  a 
platform  at  the  far  end  of  the  room  with  a 
piano  on  it,  a  small  picture  screen  behind  it,  a 
bar  to  the  right  of  it  and  a  stair  to  the  left  of  it. 
Benches  in  the  room  and  long  tables  and  all  of 
these  occupied  by  all  sorts  and  conditions  of 
humans.  Frenchmen,  and  French  soldiers, 
American  doughboys  and  officers,  and  here  and 
there  a  cheap  cocotte — and  smoke!  One  could 
^scarcely  see  the  length  of  the  room. 

The  entertainment  was  being  given  by 
[74] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

French  soloists  and  by  naughty  tales  told  in 
silhouette   by  paper  figures  on  the   "movie 


screen." 


After  an  interval  some  one  asked  one  of  the 
Americans  present  to  sing.  He  passed  along 
the  word  that  Miss  Brice  of  our  company 
could  sing  and  in  a  jiffy  she  was  forced  on  to 
the  platform  and  Mr.  Morrisey  of  our  com- 
pany was  rattling  off  an  accompaniment  for 
her.  The  French  and  the  Americans  were 
wild  with  delight.  She  was  given  a  "double 
claque"  and  made  to  sing  until  she  was  hoarse 
then  we  went  out  into  the  street  again  and 
glanced  almost  with  envy  at  some  of  the  gay 
little  groups  that  we  saw  around  some  of  the 
small  bars,  then  we  picked  our  way  down  the 
steep  steps  and  farewell  Montmartre. 

The  next  morning  our  gas  masks  had  not 
arrived  but  the  young  lieutenant  having  ap- 
parently had  a  good  night's  sleep  decided  that 
we  could  proceed  with  the  large  masks  and  use 
them  as  a  camouflage  if  questioned  en  route, 
provided  we  would  exchange  them  at  one  of 
the  hospital  bases  further  up  where  he  had  re- 
cently shipped  some  small  masks  for  Red 
Cross  nurses. 

[75] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

We  went  to  another  part  of  the  town  for  our 
iron  helmets  and  then  returned  to  the  "Y" 
armed  with  our  new  implements  of  war. 

Here  we  accumulated  our  "roll-ups"  blank- 
ets and  cots,  for  we  could  be  sure  of  no  bedding 
accommodations  in  the  region  to  which  we 
were  going.  How  we  came  to  detest  these 
blankets  and  cots  during  the  following  weeks 
when  we  staggered  under  them  by  day  and 
tried  to  cling  to  them  by  night!  And  how  we 
longed  to  throw  away  our  gas  masks  and  hel- 
mets and  all  the  rest  of  our  cursed  parapher- 
nalia and  how  weary  we  grew  always  having  to 
go  back  for  one  or  the  other  of  these  that  some 
one  in  the  party  had  always  forgotten. 

Our  first  irritation  began  at  the  Paris  sta- 
tion when  our  trappings  became  entangled 
with  those  of  other  cross  grained  individuals 
also  pushing  and  jostling  to  make  the  over- 
crowded train.  But  once  we  were  on  the  edge 
of  the  country  where  real  battles  had  been 
fought  and  looking  out  the  car  windows  at 
shell  holes,  graves,  grass-grown  trenches  and 
heaps  of  mortar  and  brick  where  villages  had 
been,  we  forgot  all  our  lesser  trials  and  began 

[76] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

to  suspect  something  of  the  seriousness  of  the 
great  tragedy  that  we  were  approaching. 

A  little  further  up  we  began  to  see  on  the 
white  roadways,  paralleling  the  track,  long 
lines  of  grey  camions  moving  north  with  men 
and  supplies,  then  cavalry  halted  on  the  banks 
of  the  streams  or  canals  for  their  noonday  rest, 
then  more  shell  holes — one  with  an  impudent 
poppy  nodding  from  its  very  brink,  and  hours 
and  hours  later,  because  the  railways  were  con- 
gested with  supply  and  hospital  trains,  we 
reached  a  town  in  the  region  of  the  Argonne, 
which  we  were  to  use  as  a  central  point  for  our 
scouting  tours — a  town  that  was  to  be  for  many 
months  a  point  of  contact  between  the  Argonne 
trail  and  the  more  removed  political  and  supply 
bases  that  fed  one  of  the  final  battles  of  the 
war.  Day  and  night,  day  and  night,  so  close 
that  one  could  scarcely  pick  one's  way  across 
the  road,  the  great  grey  camions  rumbled 
through  the  streets  of  the  little  village  on  their 
way  to  "The  Sacred  Road'*  that  would  lead 
them  later  toward  the  encounter.  Some  of  the 
camions  were  loaded  with  men  packed  so  tight 
that  they  made  one  think  only  of  the  animals 
that  one  sees  in  cattle  cars — animals  being 

[77]i 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

shipped  to  pens  for  slaughter.    Other  camions 
bore  heavy  fire  arms  and  ammunition. 

The  streets  of  the  village  and  the  hotels  were 
filled  with  wayfarers,  some  of  importance, 
some  who  had  failed  to  connect  with  their  regi- 
ments, a  few  I  have  reason  to  believe  who  were 
trying  to  desert — young  boys  who  had  been  de- 
tached intentionally  or  otherwise  from  their 
command  and  who  feared  to  be  caught  by  the 
local  military  police  and  thrown  into  jail. 

One  of  these  boys  had  been  sent  back  down 
the  line  with  a  detail  of  sick  horses,  He  had 
delivered  his  horses  but  had  failed  to  catch  up 
again  with  his  regiment  and  was  wandering 
about  the  streets,  frightened  and  hungry  when 
a  kindly  officer  succeeded  in  getting  his  confi- 
dence and  persuaded  him  to  go  to  the  police 
and  tell  his  tale  and  escape  capture  and  arrest. 

Sometimes  a  whole  company  of  lost  men 
would  drift  into  the  village,  hungry  and  foot- 
sore and  with  no  place  to  sleep,  some  misunder- 
standing having  left  them  without  proper  pro- 
vision or  command.  In  such  a  case  the  "Y" 
would  allow  them  to  sleep  on  the  floor  of  the 
canteen  and  provide  them,  as  far  as  possible, 
with  chocolate. 

[78] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

We  played  two  nights  in  this  town  in  a 
theatre  rented  by  the  French  to  the  "Y" 
for  the  price  of  the  electricity.  The  show  was 
a  great  success — it  was  the  first  that  many  of 
the  hoys  had  seen  since  leaving  America.  Our 
audience  was  made  up  of  cavalrymen,  infan- 
trymen, airmen,  doughboys  and  officers,  French 
and  American,  for  every  variety  of  soldier  was 
either  passing  through  the  town  or  stationed 
near  it.  They  all  applauded  and  our  own 
boys  cheered  and  whistled.  We  were  cold  and 
hungry  after  our  performance  so  the  "  Y"  man 
led  us  back  to  the  kitchen  of  the  canteen  where 
a  tired  soul  was  ladelling  out  hot  chocolate 
from  huge  caldrons  on  the  range  and  by  the 
time  we  left  the  kitchen  the  floor  of  the  hall 
leading  to  it  had  become  so  occupied  by  ex- 
hausted soldiers  that  we  had  to  fairly  step  over 
them  to  get  back  to  the  street. 

There  was  no  room  for  us  in  any  of  the  ho- 
tels so  we  slept  on  our  cots  in  a  store  room  of 
the  "Y"  across  the  street — if  one  can  ever  be 
said  to  sleep  the  first  night  he  rides  a  cot.  I 
was  wakened  early  the  next  morning  to  find  a 
dignified  old  gentleman — a  French  official  in 
silk  hat  and  civilian  clothes — waiting  outside 
179] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

my  door  to  apologise  for  what  he  considered 
the  rude  behaviour  of  the  boys  who  had  whis- 
tled at  our  show  the  night  before.  He  said 
that  he  thought  the  performance  most  amusing 
and  deserving  of  anything  but  derision,  and  it 
was  only  by  the  aid  of  one  of  his  countrymen 
who  was  called  in  to  interpret  for  us  that  I 
was  able  to  make  him  understand  that  with  the 
Americans  whistling  is  a  mark  of  approval, 
whereas  in  the  French  theatre  it  indicates  the 
;  reverse. 

During  the  day  we  wandered  about  the 
streets  and  everywhere  one  turned  there  were 
opportunities  for  doing  good.  For  instance 
some  of  those  up  here  on  the  edge  of  the  danger 
zone  undergoing  hardships  were  inclined  to 
speak  slightingly  of  those  in  Paris  in  executive 
positions  who  "had  it  easy,"  but  when  we 
pointed  out  to  them  that  the  chaps  in  Paris 
would  give  their  eye  teeth  to  be  up  near  the 
firing  line  and  that  they  were  already  dreading 
the  day  when  they  must  go  home  and  tell  their 
sweethearts  and  families  that  they  got  only  to 
Paris — then  the  chaps  up  nearer  the  front  were 
happier  again. 

I  climbed  up  to  a  magnificent  view  on  a  high 
[80] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

mountain  back  of  the  hotel.  Soldiers  crowded 
every  nook  and  crannie  of  the  ruined  cathedral 
on  the  mountain's  crest.  They  also  were  on 
their  way  to  the  front.  At  the  foot  of  the  hill, 
tied  to  an  iron  ring  in  an  old  stone  wall,  stood 
a  wreck  of  a  horse  with  a  festering  shrapnel 
wound  in  his  shoulder.  The  poor  beast  strained 
in^vain  toward  a  few  spears  of  grass  growing 
just  outside  his  reach.  I  gathered  the  grass 
and  gave  it  to  him.  I  found  a  sympathetic 
French  girl  in  a  shack  near  by  and  she  found 
some  hay  for  the  beast.  I  was  so  grateful  that 
I  cried.  She  brought  me  some  water  to  wash 
the  tears  away  and  the  sea  that  rolls  between 
our  two  countries  and  the  babble  of  tongues 
that  confuse  meant  very  little. 

I  couldn't  leave  the  horse  until  some  one  had 
adopted  him  and  at  last  an  ambulance  came 
and  took  him  away,  still  munching  the  hay  that 
we  transferred  to  the  ambulance. 

Further  down  the  street  a  French  lad  was 
carrying  a  fox  terrier  in  his  arms  and  crying 
over  it — a  passing  camion  had  broken  its  leg. 
Again  the  tears  came  to  my  eyes  and  yet  I 
looked  down  that  same  street  at  miles  upon 
miles  of  human  beings  borne  forward  to  slaugh- 

[81] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

ter  in  these  same  grey  camions  and  I  could  not 
cry.  It  was  all  too  horrible  and  too  colossal 
— neither  could  I  sleep  that  night  for  we  were 
now  in  a  hotel  with  rooms  fronting  on  the  street 
and  the  constant  procession  of  hoofs  and  wheels 
on  the  cobble  stones  sounded  to  our  tired  nerves 
like  the  roar  of  the  ocean. 

As  I  came  in  that  evening  I  had  noticed 
through  the  open  door  of  the  room  next  to 
mine  a  bent  old  figure  in  black,  sitting  near  the 
window,  gazing  into  space.  Near  her  on  the 
bed  sat  a  young  girl  so  tragic  and  strained  in 
her  grief  that  I  was  sure  she  did  not  even  know 
that  the  door  stood  ajar  and  I  hurried  into  my 
own  room  feeling  a  little  ashamed  of  having 
seen  what  was  not  meant  for  my  eyes. 

Later  in  the  night,  as  I  turned  my  pillow 
again  and  again  trying  to  make  it  fit  into  the 
tired  spot  in  the  back  of  my  neck,  I  heard  the 
door  of  the  next  room  thrown  open  and  I 
could  almost  see  the  girl  who  fell  sobbing  with 
her  arms  round  her  mother.  I've  heard  many 
women  cry  in  my  life  and  some  men  but  I 
never  knew  until  then  what  agony  could  come 
out  of  a  human  soul.  And  the  mother  spoke 
no  word — it  was  no  use.  It  was  daylight  when 

[82] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

the  sobs  at  last  died  into  low  infrequent  moans 
and  I  learned  that  the  girl  had  come  from  the 
death  bed  of  her  fiance  whom  she  and  the  poor 
old  mother  had  travelled  days  and  nights  to 
find. 

We  played  many  nights  in  this  town  for  the 
steady  stream  of  troops  continued  to  pass 
through  it.  We  also  played  the  engineering 
camps,  supply  camps  and  aviation  camps  there- 
abouts— there  were  sixteen  of  the  last — and 
I  shall  never  forget  the  first  time  that  we  drove 
up  to  one  of  the  most  important  of  these,  the 
"First  Pursuit  Group."  Everything  as  far  as 
the  eye  could  reach  had  been  camouflaged, 
hangars,  huts  and  trucks  and  the  green  and 
yellow  new-art  designs  looked  so  fantastic  and 
queer  in  the  twilight. 

"The  Little  Major,"  as  he  was  fondly  called 
by  the  men  of  his  group,  had  arranged  for  us 
to  dine  before  the  show  in  the  mess  tent  at  the 
foot  of  the  hill,  below  a  newly  ploughed  field. 
By  the  time  dinner  was  over  the  rain  was  com- 
ing down  in  torrents,  the  field  was  a  lake  of 
mud  and  it  was  impossible  to  move  the  automo- 
bile that  had  brought  us. 

We  set  out  on  foot  toward  the  distant  han- 
[83] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

gar  where  men  from  other  aviation  camps  were 
also  waiting  for  us.  We  were  not  supposed 
even  to  use  our  pocket  flashes,  for  enemy  obser- 
vation planes  might  be  far  above  us  in  the  black 
sky.  The  women  carried  their  evening  slip- 
pers under  their  arms,  meaning  to  put  them  on 
later  when  we  reached  the  hangar  and  it  was 
not  until  we  were  at  the  very  entrance  of  it 
that  one  of  the  girls  discovered  that  one  of  her 
slippers  was  missing.  Such  a  to-do!  It  was 
not  an  easy  matter  to  get  satin  slippers  in  this 
benighted  corner  of  the  earth  and  we  were 
headed  for  even  more  benighted  regions. 

She  was  tired  and  depressed  by  the  long  pull 
through  the  mud  and  she  fell  onto  a  camp  stool 
inside  the  big  truck  that  had  been  rolled  inside 
the  hangar  to  serve  as  a  dressing  room  and  be- 
gan to  cry.  Her  street  shoes  were  caked  in 
mud  to  their  tops  and  she  refused  to  try  to  play 
in  them. 

Three  aviators  Immediately  shot  off  into  the 
darkness  with  one  of  our  own  men  to  search  the 
muddy  field  for  the  missing  slipper.  They  re- 
turned with  it  at  last  and  by  this  time  the  audi- 
ence which  we  had  heard  but  not  seen  were 
booing,  whistling  and  clapping  with  impa- 

[84] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

tience.  At  last  the  missing  slipper  was  re- 
covered and  on  the  lady's  small  foot.  I  was 
frightfully  nervous  as  I  pushed  aside  the  green 
silesia  curtains  that  we  always  carried  and 
cleared  my  throat  to  make  the  supposedly 
comic  speech  with  which  we  always  opened 
the  show.  I  never  could  remember  afterward 
just  what  I  said,  for  of  all  the  picturesque  au- 
diences that  I  had  ever  seen  this  was  certainly 
the  most  fantastic. 

There  were  twenty-five  hundred  men,  so  we 
were  afterwards  told,  huddled  together  on  the 
ground  and  above  them  imperilling  their  own 
lives  and  those  of  the  men  underneath,  were 
hundreds  of  others  intertwined  in  the  huge  steel 
framework  supporting  the  largest  hangar  that 
I  had  ever  seen.  Some  of  the  men  seemed  to 
be  holding  onto  their  perches  like  monkeys, 
their  feet  crossed  round  a  bar  of  steel,  others 
had  made  themselves  comfortable  on,  wide 
beams  and  were  lying  with  their  hands  crossed 
under  their  heads,  and  all  through  the  per- 
formance I  could  scarcely  keep  my  mind  on 
the  lines  of  the  playlet  for  trying  to  locate 
various  members  of  the  audience  and  fearing 
that  some  of  them  would  tumble  off  their 

[85] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

perches  when  they  released  their  hold  to  ap- 
plaud— and  how  they  did  applaud  and  yell, 
and  how  wild  and  picturesque  it  all  looked  in 
the  fog  that  had  crept  in  through  the  cracks 
and  made  golden  circles  round  the  dim  torch 
light.  And  then  came  the  whir  of  an  enemy  ob- 
servation plane  overhead  and  a  hush  and  no- 
thing said  and  then  on  with  the  show. 

The  next  day  we  were  sent  to  a  camp  nearby 
where  it  was  hoped  that  Miss  Brice  and  I 
would  at  last  find  the  small  gas  masks.  There 
was  nothing  among  the  American  masks  that 
would  do,  so  it  was  decided  to  give  us  the  old 
style  French  masks  for  which  we  were  devout- 
ly grateful  for  they  seemed  far  easier  to  ad- 
just. It  was  pointed  out  to  us  that  the  oxygen 
in  these  would  not  last  so  many  hours  as  in 
the  American  masks  but  we  in  turn  pointed 
out  that  we  couldn't  run  more  than  one  hour 
at  the  most. 

We  had  received  our  final  equipment  none 
too  soon  for  the  next  morning  with  our  blan- 
kets, folding  cots,  new  masks  and  helmets  we 
were  loaded  into  an  army  car  and  taken  yet 
further  up  the  line  to  an  engineering  camp 

[86] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

on  the  side  of  a  hill  on  the  edge  of  the  Argonne 
forest. 

It  was  explained  that  we  could  be  billeted 
here  in  the  engineers'  barracks  because  there 
was  a  supply  station  nearby,  from  which  pro- 
visions and  ammunition  were  "shot"  up  to  men 
in  the  front  lines,  just  above,  and  we  would 
also  have  thousands  of  troops  to  which  to  play, 
as  the  woods  for  miles  around  were  sheltering 
troops  that  kept  under  cover  by  day  and 
marched  by  night,  so  that  the  enemy's  observa- 
tion planes  might  not  discover  the  full  strength 
of  the  blow  that  we  were  preparing  to  deliver. 

Some  of  the  officers  in  the  barracks  were 
kind  enough  to  give  up  one  of  their  rooms  to 
the  three  women  of  our  company  and  our  cots 
were  tucked  into  this  room  so  closely  that  we 
had  to  crawl  over  the  foot  of  them  to  get  into 
bed.  The  men  of  the  company  were  put  into 
an  equally  small  room  behind  the  kitchen  of 
the  officers'  mess  and  Mr.  Morrisey  says  that 
he  will  never  forget  the  sound  of  the  rats  claws 
as  they  scratched  their  way  up  and  over  the 
slick  surface  of  the  tarpaulin  under  which  it 
was  necessary  to  sleep  to  keep  out  the  damp- 
ness. He  says  he  used  to  lie  awake  in  the  night 

[87] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

and  gamble  with  himself  as  to  which  of  the  rats 
would  get  "over  the  top"  first. 

At  the  foot  of  the  hill  below  the  main  build- 
ing was  a  black  little  "lean-to"  called  "The 
Greasy  Spoon." 

It  was  at  the  intersection  of  many  lines  of 
track  that  our  American  engineers  had  been 
laying  for  months — track  connecting  with  our 
main  bases  of  supplies  hundreds  of  miles  be- 
low, with  the  shipsdocks  still  further  below, 
and  with  intermediary  hospitals  and  supply 
bases,  and  finally  with  the  very  outposts  of 
what  was  to  mark  the  starting  point  of  the 
great  and  final  offensive. 

And  over  these  tracks  every  twenty  minutes 
American  engines  were  passing  with  long 
trains  of  American  cars — cars  bearing  food, 
guns,  tanks,  aeroplanes,  Red  Cross  supplies, 
humans,  live  stock,  portable  houses,  hospital 
tents  and  huge  barrels  of  gasoline  and  oil.  And 
wherever  these  latter  were  known  to  be  side- 
tracked the  Boche  planes  were  quickly  over- 
head to  drop  explosives  in  the  hope  of  start- 
ing a  general  conflagration.  The  light  from 
these  explosives,  sometimes  near  sometimes  far, 
was  almost  the  only  light  that  we  saw  these 
[88] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

nights,  for  the  camp  was  obliged  to  keep  itself 
in  utter  darkness  lest  even  one  tiny  spark  of 
light  might  serve  as  a  target  for  the  Boche 
planes  constantly  hovering  overhead. 

The  hut  in  which  we  gave  our  first  show  was 
hermetically  sealed  and  the  entrance  hung  with 
double  curtains  so  that  no  ray  of  light  should 
escape,  and  not  even  a  lighted  cigarette  was 
permitted  to  any  one  departing  from  it  and 
the  same  rules  were  applied  to  the  mess  room 
and  sleeping  quarters. 

In  fact  divers  tales  were  told  of  a  whole 
company  being  wiped  out  near  that  very  spot 
by  an  idiot  who  had  lighted  a  cigarette  just 
as  a  Boche  bombing  plane  was  passing  over- 
head, though  it  was  suspected  by  some  that 
he  was  a  spy  and  took  this  way  of  giving  a 
signal. 

In  any  case,  the  black  surroundings  did 
not  prevent  the  thousands  of  boys  hidden  with 
their  commands  in  the  adjoining  woods  from 
finding  their  way  to  the  hut  for  our  first  show 
and  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  we  gave  two  shows 
the  same  night  hundreds  had  to  be  sent  away 
with  the  promise  of  other  shows  the  next  night 
for  those  who  had  not  been  swept  on  toward 

[89] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

"the  front."  It  was  late  when  we'd  finished 
the  second  performance  and  as  usual  we  were 
hungry,  so  one  of  the  officers  helped  us  to  pick 
our  way  down  the  hill  to  "The  Greasy  Spoon" 
and  here  we  met  our  first  "Corned  Willie" 
also  some  undecorated  heroes. 

A  youth  who  had  been  on  duty  forty-eight 
hours,  his  face  smeared  with  soot,  his  hands  red 
and  swollen,  stood  with  his  back  to  the  glowing 
oven  "slinging"  corn  willie,  beans,  and  coffee 
across  a  counter  of  dry  goods  boxes  to  tired 
grimy  trainmen  who  were  averaging  only  three 
hours'  sleep  a  night  and  were  putting  through 
a  train  every  twenty  minutes — an  American 
train  over  American  tracks  laid  by  American 
engineers,  manned  by  American  soldiers,  bear- 
ing American  supplies,  ammunition,  and  men. 
Just  now  they  were  rejoicing  in  having  run  a 
train  for  the  first  time  over  the  last  section 
of  track  laid  to  the  very  line  of  what  was  soon 
to  become  our  fighting  front — these  last  miles 
of  track  had  been  laid  under  shell  fire  but 
would  save  eight  hours  in  the  transportation 
of  the  wounded  and  that  eight  hours  would 
mean  life  or  death  to  hundreds. 

[90] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

It  was  in  "The  Greasy  Spoon"  that  we  first 
heard  the  doughboys'  frank  opinion  of  what 
they  called  "Sammie  backers,"  meaning  the 
fellows  who  stay  at  home  and  send  them  cigar- 
ettes and  "good  wishes." 

In  fact  there  were  few  things,  persons,  or 
institutions  that  did  not  come  in  for  their  fair 
share  of  criticism  in  the  black  little  shanty  with 
its  long  benches  and  tables  lit  only  by  flickering 
candles  and  the  yellow  light  from  the  open 
oven.  Generals,  Presidents  and  fickle  sweet- 
hearts were  introduced  and  retired  with  a 
phrase  or  a  shrug  and  above  the  jangle  of  tin 
pans  and  forks  one  caught  fragmentary  re- 
ports of  the  night's  happenings,  trains  over- 
turned, gasoline  cars  shelled,  tracks  blown  out, 
and  trainmen  killed. 

I  was  inclined  to  wonder  if  these  moody, 
overworked  men  and  boys  were  colouring  some 
of  the  details  to  entertain  us  "tenderfeet" — 
but  next  morning  in  the  officers*  mess  where  we 
were  treated  like  members  of  the  family,  we 
could  not  escape  hearing  most  of  these  reports 
repeated  and  we  began  to  look  with  new  ad- 
miration on  the  grim  business  like  men  who 
sat  with  us  at  table.  They  were  not  typical 

[91] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

army  men  nor  were  all  of  them  young  enough 
to  come  within  the  draft  age.  Some  of  them 
were  men  not  unlike  others  I  mentioned  earlier, 
rich,  successful  and  at  the  height  of  their  busi- 
ness careers.  They  had  given  up  interesting 
occupations  to  assume  duties  they  had  left  be- 
hind in  their  youth  and  had  not  seen  their 
homes  since  the  very  start  of  the  war.  Who 
can  say  when  the  records  of  these  years  are 
printed  that  there  is  no  idealism  in  the  busi- 
ness world  of  to-day? 

After  breakfast,  we  walked  to  the  little 
French  Cemetery  on  the  top  of  the  hill,  above 
the  barracks,  and  here  the  American  flags  told 
the  tale  of  many  who  would  never  see  their 
homes  again — not  men  who  had  been  mentioned 
for  brilliant  service  or  had  the  thrill  of  going 
"over  the  top"  but  men  who  had  died  in  ob- 
scurity providing  ways  and  means  for  their 
more  fortunate  fellows  to  go  "over  the  top." 

The  Chaplain  of  the  regiment  joined  us  in 
our  walk  and  asked  if  we'd  like  to  take  a  look 
at  a  lost  division  that  was  making  camp  in 
the  woods  above.  We  asked  what  he  meant  by 
"lost."  He  told  us  how  the  Commander  of 
[92] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

these  twenty  thousand  men  had  received  in- 
structions to  proceed  to  this  point,  where  fur- 
ther orders  were  presumably  to  be  waiting  for 
him,  but,  finding  no  orders,  he  had  no  other 
course  than  to  conceal  his  men  in  the  woods 
and  bide  his  time. 

From  where  we  stood  there  was  no  sign  of 
life  whatever,  but  we  had  not  beat  our  way 
more  than  a  hundred  feet  through  the  thick 
underbrush  when  we  literally  fell  upon  thou- 
sands of  burrowing,  slashing  humans,  hacking 
their  way  through  the  vines  and  bushes  to  make 
trails  to  central  points  of  manoeuvre,  and  using 
the  cut  boughs  to  camouflage  the  tops  of  their 
"pup  tents"  and  wagons,  so  that  enemy  obser- 
vation planes  could  see  only  what  was  ap- 
parently a  thick  forest.  These  thousands  of 
busy,  bent  figures  made  one  think  of  ants  tak- 
ing possession  of  a  new  home.  So  close  and 
so  well  concealed  were  their  "pup  tents"  that 
it  took  us  some  time  to  realise  that  we  were  in 
the  midst  of  whole  villages  of  them — canvas 
coops,  so  low  and  so  small  that  the  two  men 
allotted  to  each  have  barely  room  enough  to 
crawl  in  side  by  side  and  roll  up  in  their  blan- 
kets— the  canvas  is  supposed  to  protect  the 

[93] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

men  from  the  rain  but  it  is  taken  as  a  matter 
of  course  that  in  case  of  hard  rain  the  men 
wake  up  in  puddles  of  water.  One  of  our 
players  remarked  that  these  must  be  called 
"pup  tents"  because  no  dog  would  sleep  in 
them.  And  speaking  of  dogs  our  doughboys 
have  dubbed  the  identification  tags  which  the 
army  are  compelled  to  wear  on  their  wrists  or 
necks  "dog  tags."  This  is  typical  of  the  mat- 
ter-of-fact way  in  which  our  men  regard  the 
grim  business  of  war.  They  have  no  false 
sentimentality  to  buoy  them  up,  no  love  of 
adventure,  no  inborn  lust  of  blood,  nothing 
but  a  frank  abhorrence  for  the  wholesale 
butchery  and  brutality  into  which  they  find 
themselves  plunged  and  a  steady  stoical  de- 
termination to  see  the  job  through. 

"Somebody  has  to  do  it,"  one  of  them  said 
to  me,  "so  we  might  as  well  get  it  over  as  soon 
as  possible." 

One  doughboy,  hacking  at  a  tough  root  near 
a  space  being  cleared  for  the  cooking  oven,  ex- 
pressed what  most  of  them  feel  about  France. 
He  was  hungry  and  tired  and  drenched  to  the 
skin  and  he  didn't  care  who  heard  him.  "The 
only  thing  that  would  serve  the  Germans 
[94] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

right,"  he  said,  "would  be  to  give  them  a 
damned  good  licking  and  then  give  them 
France."  The  officer  who  stood  near  me  pre- 
tended not  to  hear,  but  I  caught  a  sly  smile 
lurking  around  his  lips  and  I  remarked  that  the 
French  scenery  didn't  seem  to  impress  the 
doughboys  as  much  as  it  did  the  American 
tourists.  He  answered  that  it  was  not  the 
scenery  that  got  on  their  nerves  but  the  lack  of 
sanitary  plumbing,  and  he  admitted  that  it 
would  be  a  pretty  hard  matter  for  travel  pam- 
phlets ever  to '"sell"  France  to  any  of  our 
doughboys. 

"Come  on,  fellows,"  shouted  this  particular 
boy  when  he'd  finally  torn  out  the  unruly  root 
and  given  way  to  the  mess  sergeant  who  was 
waiting  to  lay  his  brick  for  the  oven. 

"I'm  going  down  to  the  de-louser."     The  I 
"de-louser"  is  the  name  the  boys  give  to  the 
public  baths  that  assist  them  in  separating 
themselves  and  their  clothes  from  their  cooties. 

"Those  boys  are  willing  to  miss  their  mess 
to  get  that  bath,"  the  officer  said,  "they're  a 
damned  clean  lot,"  and  so  they  were  and  soon 
a  long  line  of  them  was  filing  down  the  hill, 
some  toward  the  de-louser,  some  to  carry  up 

[95] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

the  water  for  the  mess — and  by  the  time  we 
reached  our  barracks  mid- way  on  the  hill,  some 
of  them  were  already  filing  back  again  and 
once  more  I  was  reminded  of  ants — busy  and 
steady,  their  minds  thoroughly  on  the  affair 
of  the  moment. 

This  "lodging  for  the  night"  we  soon  learned 
was  typical  of  hundreds  of  others  in  the  forest 
all  round  us.  And  each  day  our  local  "Y" 
guide  would  take  us  in  a  car  to  some  thicket 
where  within  twenty  minutes  we  would  have 
such  an  audience  as  none  of  us  shall  prob- 
ably ever  see  again.  Sometimes  we  would 
mount  a  truck  for  our  performance;  for 
wagons,  artillery,  and  horses  were  also  con- 
cealed in  these  woods,  but  more  often  we  would 
play  on  the  ground,  and  the  officer  in  command 
would  give  the  order  for  the  first  few  hundred 
boys  to  lie  flat,  those  behind  them  were  per- 
mitted to  kneel,  those  at  the  back  could  stand 
and  those  who  were  "left  over"  would  "shin- 
ney"  up  the  trees  like  squirrels  and  drape 
themselves  across  the  branches  and  hang  sus- 
pended in  strained  attitudes  during  the  entire 
show.  If  we  happened  to  be  playing  in  a 
young  forest  we  were  sometimes  almost  dizzy 

[96] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

with  the  swaying  of  the  slender  saplings  wav- 
ing back  and  forth  under  the  weight  of  human 
bodies. 

Sometimes  our  performance  would  be  can- 
celled or  cut  short  by  the  men  to  whom  we  were 
playing  being  suddenly  ordered  forward.  On 
one  occasion  when  our  "Y"  conductor  had 
happened  to  leave  us  to  the  Colonel  of  the 
regiment  who  had  volunteered  to  send  us  home 
in  his  car,  the  whole  division  was  ordered  for- 
ward in  the  midst  of  our  performance.  The 
Colonel  had  no  alternative  but  to  move  with 
them  and  we  were  obliged  to  walk  to  the 
nearest  railway  station  and  beat  our  way 
"home"  huddled  together  on  a  meat  chest  in  a 
box  car.  We  arrived  about  midnight,  hungry 
and  chilled  and  as  we  picked  our  way  through 
the  mud  and  the  darkness  up  the  hill  toward 
the  barracks  Ray  Walker  our  musician  drew 
his  foot  out  of  a  hole  and  paused  long  enough 
to  remark  that  he  was  sick  of  life  and  he  didn't 
care  whether  his  gas  mask  fitted  or  not. 

But  the  next  morning  we  were  all  going 
back  down  the  hill  in  the  sunlight  with  the  de- 
spised gas  masks  and  helmets,  because  the  Col- 

[97] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

onel  of  the  regiment  where  we  were  billeted 

!had  decided  that  we  had  been  working  so  hard 
that  we  deserved  a  little  pleasure  trip  and  had 
detailed  one  of  his  lieutenants  to  take  us,  in  a 
limousine,  to  see  the  ruins  of  Verdun  a  few 
miles  distant.  Verdun!  White  dust-covered 
heaps  of  stone  and  bricks,  crumbling  mortar, 
silent  streets  paved  with  huge,  shiny  cobble- 
stones, solemn  faced  gates  that  have  withstood 
for  ages  the  onslaughts  of  man  and  of  nature, 
the  sluggish  Meuse  winding  stealthily  round 
the  base  of  the  hill  and,  looking  up  from  the 
Gateway,  the  walls  of  the  magnificent  Cathe- 
dral still  crowning  the  hill-top. 

We  halted  the  car  at  the  foot  of  the  hill  and 
our  lieutenant  went  in  search  of  some  one  who 
would  give  us  permission  to  enter  the  fortress 
underneath  the  mountain. 

He  was  gone  so  long  that  our  party  disap- 
peared, one  by  one,  up  the  mountain  side — each 
impatient  to  do  his  or  her  own  exploring.  I 
was  last  to  leave  the  car  and  as  I  did  so  I 
noticed  a  small  man  in  black  coming  toward 
me  round  the  bend  in  the  white  road-way. 
With  him  walked  a  soldier  in  American  uni- 
form and  several  French  officials.  He  made 
[98] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

his  way  up  the  hill  with  them  talking  earnestly. 
It  was  Secretary  Baker. 

Out  of  the  golden  stillness  came  a  "Hello" — 
our  Lieutenant  was  returning  with  a  military 
guide  to  lead  us  through  the  Fortress.  We  en- 
tered by  way  of  a  cold  damp  tunnel  through 
which  narrow  gauge  cars  were  being  pushed — 
they  were  laden  with  provisions  and  presently 
we  were  in  the  midst  of  huge  bakeries  where 
miles  of  bread,  flour  and  cereals  were  stored — 
from  there  we  passed  to  what  looked  like  a 
wholesale  grocery  store  and  from  there  to  a 
restaurant  where  thousands  of  men  were  hav- 
ing their  mid-day  meal,  discussing  the  politics, 
feuds  or  amusements  of  their  underground 
world  with  the  same  vehemence  with  which  we 
discuss  similar  matters  in  our  over-world. 

With  the  artist's  desire  to  show  us  a  con- 
trasting picture  the  guide  now  led  us  to  a  gay 
little  chapel — still  underground — where  these 
same  men  were  accustomed  to  worship.  It  was 
charming  and  reassuring  in  colour  and  detail 
but  it  always  seems  incongruous  to  think  of 
men  communing  with  God  underground  and 
later  when  we  passed  out  into  the  sunlight  I 

[99] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

felt  as  though  I  had  emerged  from  a  strange 
world  of  gnomes. 

On  top  of  the  hill,  sublime  in  its  isolation  and 
with  dignity  wrapping  it  round  and  enfolding 
it  in  a  soft  mantle  of  haze,  stood  the  great  Ca- 
thedral. 

We  climbed  up  to  it — no  tourists — no  voice 
to  break  the  silence  save  that  of  one  lone  watch- 
man. 

We  gazed  in  awe  at  the  high  vaulted  en- 
trance that  still  remained  intact,  then  stepped 
with  reverence  on  the  worn  stones  leading  to 
the  main  body  of  the  church — stones  over  which 
so  many  thousands  of  feet  had  so  often  borne 
aching  or  rejoicing  hearts. 

We  were  barely  out  of  the  shadow  of  the 
vestibule  when  a  shaft  of  light  made  us  turn 
our  eyes  upward  and  there  before  us  stood  the 
four  great  twisted  columns  of  marble  that  had 
once  supported  the  canopy  of  the  high  altar, 
now  reaching  their  empty  arms  toward  the  sun- 
light pouring  through  the  shell-torn  roof  and 
to  the  blue  sky  beyond. 

And  the  altar  itself — that  fine  slab  of  un- 
adorned marble  that  seemed  all  the  more  im- 
posing stripped  of  everything  save  its  own  en- 
[100] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROGBS 

during  quality  and  symbolism!  We  edged 
nearer  to  it  and  lingered  there,  saying  little. 
Its  very  presence  gave  one  a  confidence  in  the 
ultimate  survival  of  the  fine  and  the  strong. 

Next  the  guide  led  us  to  one  of  the  smaller 
sanctuaries  of  the  cathedral  where  a  shell  had 
just  shattered  the  crucifix  above  the  altar — 
fragments  of  blue  glass  still  lay  on  the  tiled 
floor  where  they  had  fallen  from  a  broken  vase. 
We  turned  our  eyes  again  toward  the  high  al- 
tar. Doves  now  flew  in  and  out  at  random 
through  the  great  shell  hole  in  the  vaulted  ceil- 
ing, the  altar  was  bathed  in  noon  sunlight  and 
through  the  shattered  windows  in  the  opposite 
wall  unruly  vines  were  beginning  to  creep  from 
the  garden  of  the  Convent  of  Marguerite,  nes- 
tling with  such  confidence  under  the  eaves  of  its 
great  protector.  And  everywhere  there  was 
majesty  and  calm  dignity — damage,  perhaps 
but  not  destruction.  There  was  a  spirit  within 
those  battered  walls  that  seemed  to  defy  de- 
struction. 

We  were  late  reaching  camp  for  our  lunch- 
eon and  I  at  first  thought  that  the  restrained 
air  of  the  Colonel  and  the  heavy  silence  of  his 
men  was  due  to  our  tardiness.  Then  I  remem- 
[101] 


TJIOUPINXJ    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

bered  another  and  similar  change  in  the  social 
atmosphere  weeks  before  at  G.  H.  Q.  just  be- 
fore the  big  drive  on  Saint  Mihiel  and  I  felt 
certain  that  the  hour  of  attack  was  at  hand. 
Week  uponi  week  of  preparation  had  been 
under  way  and  it  had  been  remarked  the  past 
few  days  that  the  necessary  apparatus  for  the 
placement  of  some  of  the  large  naval  guns  con- 
verted to  land  service  was  the  only  thing  delay- 
ing the  announcement  of  the  "zero  hour."  And 
now  no  doubt  the  big  guns  were  in  place  and 
one  might  expect  to  hear  their  thunder  at  any 
moment. 

This  conclusion  was  strengthened  by  the  ar- 
rival of  a  courier  before  we  had  finished  lunch- 
eon. He  had  come  to  tell  us  that  the  "matinee" 
we  were  to  play  that  afternoon  for  his  regi- 
ment in  the  woods  nearby  must  be  cancelled. 
The  division  was  moving  forward  in  response 
to  a  sudden  order. 

Being  set  free  from  all  other  engagements, 
there  seemed  no  reason  why  we  should  not  con- 
sider an  invitation  to  a  pleasure  party  to  which 
"the  Little  Major"  of  the  Aviation  Camp, 
miles  back  down  the  line  had  been  trying  for 
days  to  entice  us.  He  had  'phoned  our  Colonel 
[102] 


TROUPINiG    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

of  Engineers  about  it  and  even  sent  one  of  his 
flyers  over  our  barracks  to  drop  a  note  in  our 
vicinity  reminding  us  of  it.  And  after  a  few 
hints  on  our  part  to  our  Colonel,  who  was  no 
doubt  glad  to  be  rid  of  our  prattle  at  such  a 
critical  moment  we  were  loaded  into  his  car  and 
sent  down  the  line  to  the  Aviation  Camp — it 
being  understood  of  course  that  we  were  to  re- 
turn to  the  barracks  at  a  reasonable  hour. 

When  we  arrived  at  the  Aviation  Field  we 
found  that  the  "Little  Major'*  and  some  of  his 
officers  had  taken  up  their  billet  with  a  charm- 
ing old  French  couple  in  the  village  nearby  and 
it  was  here  that  a  dinner  and  dance  were  await- 
ing us — the  first  real  dance  since  we  had  left 
America.  The  lion  of  the  occasion  was  to  be 
Eddie  Rickenbacker  who  had  just  brought 
down  his  eighth  Boche  plane  and  who  was  soon 
destined  to  win  the  title  of  "The  American 
Ace"  and  to  be  tcld  by  the  Commander  deco- 
rating him  to  increase  his  chest  expansion  to 
accommodate  the  many  more  decorations 
awaiting  him. 

The  Major's  charming  dining  room  with  its 
polished  walnut  and  candle  light  and  flow- 
[103] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

ers  looked  strangely  civilised  after  the  rough 
surroundings  to  which  we  had  become  accus- 
tomed and  he  had  managed  to  get  together  a 
stringed  orchestra  and  it  played  between 
courses  and  we  all  danced  and  "The  Little  Ma- 
jor" seemed  in  fine  spirits.  One  of  his  men  con- 
fided to  me  that  it  was  because  he'd  got  a  Boche 
that  day.  He  said  the  men  could  always  tell 
when  they  saw  the  Major  coming  home  whether 
he  had  got  a  Boche  for  if  he'd  had  a  good  day  he 
always  did  a  flip-flap  over  the  hangar.  I  ex- 
pressed surprise  that  a  commander  of  a  wing 
should  be  permitted  to  fly.  His  Aide  replied 
that  the  Major  ought  not  to  do  it,  but  he  did. 
The  Major  discovered  by  now  that  we  were 
talking  about  him  and  he  became  self-conscious 
and  blushed  like  a  girl,  so  to  change  the  subject, 
I  asked  the  man  on  my  right  the  customary 
bromidic  question  as  to  what  had  been  his  most 
thrilling  experience  in  the  service.  He  told  me 
of  having  been  ordered  one  night  during  his 
earlier  term  of  service  to  proceed  to  a  certain 
point,  pick  up  a  certain  passenger  to  whom  he 
twas  not  to  speak,  proceed  with  him  across  the 
German  lines,  drop  him  at  a  certain  point,  still 
without  speaking,  and  leave  him  there.  The 
[104] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

man  was,  of  course,  one  of  our  spies  but  my 
partner  said  that  the  most  disagreeable  moment 
of  his  whole  life  was  when  he  was  obliged  to 
depart  without  even  a  word  of  farewell  leaving 
his  unknown  passenger  in  that  "black  land  of 
hell." 

By  the  time  he  had  reached  his  dramatic  cli- 
max the  others  at  table  suddenly  burst  into 
boos  and  derisive  cat-calls  and  declared  that 
the  party  was  becoming  much  too  solemn,  so 
the  dinner  table  was  pushed  aside  and  we  began 
dancing  in  real  earnest  and  every  one  was  feel- 
ing deliciously  reckless  and  merry.  Then  sud- 
denly "The  Little  Major"  was  called  to  the 
'phone  and  again  the  old  air  of  suppressed  ex- 
citement about  which  no  one  speaks  but  every 
one  feels,  and  later,  without  any  one  exactly 
saying  so,  it  seemed  to  get  round  from  guest 
to  guest,  that  we  would  hear  the  big  guns  be- 
fore morning. 

When  we  reached  the  foot  of  the  hill  on 
which  our  barracks  stood,  it  was  later  than  we 
had  meant  it  to  be.  The  moon  had  escaped 
from  the  few  shifting  clouds  and  the  whole  val- 
ley was  bathed  in  a  soft  hazy  light.  We  were 
[105] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

still  in  a  very  happy  mood  and  we  stopped  half 
way  up  the  hill  to  look  down  on  the  valley  be- 
low us  and  at  the  dark  line  of  the  Argonne  For- 
est beyond  it,  when  suddenly  out  of  the  silvery 
distance  at  a  quarter  past  eleven,  came  the 
boom  of  the  first  Great  Gun  of  the  last  great 
battle  of  the  World's  Greatest  Conflict — and 
in  quick  succession  more  guns — great  Naval 
monsters  pressed  into  land  service,  far  from 
their  natural  bases — then  flashes  of  light  in 
front  and  to  each  side  of  us  until  we  stood  in  a 
wide  horse-shoe  of  light.  Oh,  the  thrill  of  it! 
I  sometimes  think  if  I  am  ever  to  be  born  again 
I  should  like  it  to  be  as  a  war  correspondent 
with  just  enough  income  to  insure  me  against  a 
poverty-stricken  old  age,  and  then  I  should  like 
to  stay  always  in  sound  of  the  guns.  Great 
Commanders  must  manipulate  affairs  from 
afar,  their  lives  are  too  precious  to  be  put  in 
peril,  doughboys  are  soon  killed  if  they  are 
given  their  chance  at  the  front,  but  War  cor- 
respondents are  free  agents — they  can  follow 
the  sky  rockets  of  war  and  dash  from  battle  to 
battle  wherever  the  fighting  is  thickest. 

All  night  the  heavy  firing  continued  and 
when  it  died  down  the  next  morning,  I  was 
[106] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

alarmed,  lest  something  had  given  us  a  tempo- 
rary set-back,  but  the  seasoned  campaigners 
assured  me  that  the  silence  was  a  good  sign 
for  it  meant  that  we  had  driven  the  enemy  so 
far  that  we  must  cease  firing  until  we  could 
move  our  artillery  forward  to  pursue  them,  and 
so  it  proved  to  be,  and  so  it  continued  to  be  day 
after  day  and  week  after  week. 

And  as  our  army  advanced  our  little  "En- 
tertainment Unit"  was  also  permitted  to  ad- 
vance, and  next  time,  after  fond  farewells  to 
the  Engineer  group  with  whom  we  had  been 
billeted  so  long  and  so  well,  we  were  loaded 
into  a  big  brown  touring  car  and  carried  up  the 
"Great  White  Way"  toward  the  direction  in 
which  the  big  guns  had  again  resumed  their 
booming.  Now  that  the  battle  was  on,  the 
Army  no  longer  confined  itself  to  moving 
troops  and  supplies  by  night  and  we  had  to 
pick  our  way  in  and  out  as  best  we  could  be- 
tween the  steady  stream  of  heavily  laden  cam- 
ions moving  forward  and  the  returning  stream 
of  empty  camions  moving  back  for  fresh  sup- 
plies. It  was  tedious  business  and  we  were 
sometimes  blocked  for  hours  and  ,at  times  like 
this  we  would  amuse  ourselves  watching  the 
[107] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

strange  assortment  of  men  and  things  moving 
toward  "the  front." 

Few  regiments  of  men  were  without  their 
animal  mascots — sometimes  it  would  be  a  huge 
shaggy  dog  balancing  himself  as  well  as  he 
could  on  top  of  the  rolling,  rocking  munitions, 
upon  top  of  which  he  had  been  placed,  some- 
times it  was  a  goat  held  in  the  arms  of  some 
youth  staring  into  space  with  dreamy  eyes, 
sometimes  a  rooster  or  a  parrot.  I  even  saw  an 
eagle  and  a  young  pig  with  a  ribbon  round  his 
neck.  And  they  all  moved  forward  together 
— infantry,  cavalry,  artillery — black,  white  and 
yellow — all  toward  a  fate  that  promised  them 
little  hope  of  escape  from  mutilation. 

When  we  finally  reached  our  destination  it 
proved  to  be  a  somewhat  shell-torn  town  in  the 
heart  of  which  two  important  war  arteries 
crossed  and  so  great  was  the  congestion  that  we 
could  scarcely  work  our  way  to  the  entrance  of 
the  Canteen  above  which  our  Unit  was  bil- 
leted. 

When  we  did  finally  get  to  the  door  and  up 

the  rickety  stairs  and  look  down  upon  the 

streets  from  the  windows  of  the  one,  desolate 

room  where  the  three  women  were  to  sleep,  I 

[108] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

fairly  gasped  at  the  colour  and  picturesqueness 
of  the  surging  billowing  sea  of  camions,  men 
and  animals  all  striving  to  fight  their  way 
through  the  congestion  at  the  cross-roads  and 
in  spite  of  the  waving  arms  and  harsh  com- 
mands of  the  American  military  police,  the 
"Froggies"  would  get  their  camions  out  of  line 
and  the  more  excited  they  became  by  argument 
the  further  out  of  line  they  would  get  and  gen- 
eral bedlam  would  prevail  with  every  one  ex- 
cept the  stoical  round-faced  Amanites  who 
seemed  to  sit  at  the  wheels  of  their  huge  motor 
trucks  without  speaking,  smiling,  or  looking  to 
the  right  or  the  left  at  the  Red  Cross  wagons, 
the  machine  guns,  the  "baby  tanks"  or  parent 
tanks,  the  French  cavalry,  the  black  or  white 
infantry,  or  mules — all  struggling  to  disen- 
tangle themselves  from  the  constantly  occur- 
ring "mix-ups." 

When  we  had  tired  watching  this '"midway 
plaisance"  effect  from  our  windows  we  closed 
the  shutters  and  lit  our  candles — here  again  no 
ray  of  light  was  permitted  without  everything 
being  hermetically  sealed. 

The  sole  furniture  of  our  room  consisted  of 
the  three  cots  which  we  had  brought  with  us 
[109] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

and  on  which  the  men  had  placed  our  blankets, 
one  long  rough  board  table  with  bench  and  one 
dry  goods  box  on  which  was  placed  a  small 
tin  pan  and  near  which  stood  a  tin  pail  filled 
with  water.  This  was  all.  The  walls  of  the 
room  were  streaked  with  weather  stains  from 
the  last  rain  and  the  cracks  in  the  uncarpeted 
floor  were  filled  with  the  dirt  of  ages. 

The  resident  "Y"  man  had  broken  up  some 
packing  cases  to  make  firewood  for  us  and  we 
started  a  little  blaze  and  got  out  our  towels  and 
soap  to  make  ready  for  dinner  which  we  were 
told  we  were  to  eat  at  the  sergeants'  mess 
across  the  street  and  after  which  we  were  to 
give  two  performances  in  the  town  theatre — a 
little  old  glorified  stable  that  had  defied  both 
shell  fire  and  the  ravages  of  time. 

It  did  boast  a  stage,  however,  and  tin  reflec- 
tors for  the  footlights.  The  organ  for  this  fes- 
tive occasion,  so  the  boys  at  the  mess  table  told 
us,  had  been  purloined  from  a  distant  "Y" 
hut  and  might  be  requisitioned  at  any  moment. 

We  learned  other  things  in  this  jolly  little 
Mess  with  its  open  fire  and  long  benches  and 
its  tables  covered  with  gay  oilcloth  and  its  kit- 
chen with  glowing  range  gaping  through  the 
[110] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

open  door  and  sunny  faced  good  natured  boys 
officiating  at  the  range  and  smiling  at  the 
thought  of  the  surprise  that  was  going  to 
"knock  us  cold"  when  they  gave  us  pumpkin 
pie  for  our  supper.  We  gathered  from  this 
fragmentary  conversation  that  here,  at  last,  we 
were  to  play  to  the  men  who  so  many  of  the 
Commanders  had  said  were  in  greatest  need  of 
us — the  men  who  were  just  on  the  eve  of  "go- 
ing over  the  top.'*  The  boys  of  the  mess  were 
stationed  in  the  village  as  were  their  whole  di- 
vision— a  division  that  had  been  "stuck  in  the 
mud"  up  there  for  months  holding  the  Argonne 
line  which  they  -and  their  dead  comrades  had 
helped  to  establish  four  years  ago  and  it  was' 
only  since  "the  big  offensive"  had  begun  to 
shove  this  line  back  that  the  currents  of  fresh 
war  activities  flowing  toward  the  firing  line  had 
begun  to  vitalise  the  air  of  their  torpid  little 
village. 

These  currents  were  running  flood  tide  now 
— sometimes  the  men  passed  through  in  whole 
divisions  but  more  often  in  isolated  hundreds  or 
as  individuals  and  those  last  were  the  ones  who 
touched  our  hearts  most,  they  were  called  "re- 
placements." They  had  been  detached  from 
[111] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

their  own  regiments  or  recruited  from  conva- 
lescent wards  and  shot  forward  into  unknown 
terrors  with  no  comrades  by  their  sides,  know- 
ing only  that  on  the  morrow  they  must  take  the 
places  of  the  fallen.  And  this  village  was  their 
last  stopping  place  on  the  night  before  going 
into  action.  And  on  and  on  they  came  in  such 
numbers  that  it  was  impossible  for  the  Army, 
the  "Y,"  or  the  residents  to  find  shelter  for 
them  and  they  would  curl  up  in  doorways  or 
in  the  thickets  beyond  the  village,  or  in  barns, 
or  stretch  themselves  on  the  "Y"  floor,  if  they 
were  early  enough  in  town  to  find  space  there, 
and  draw  their  overcoats  or  their  blanket  over 
them — for  by  the  time  they  had  reached  this 
place  they  had  been  stripped  of  most  of  their 
other  equipment.  It  was  impossible  to  march 
long,  under  the  weight  of  a  sixty  pound  pack 
and  extra  rounds  of  ammunition,  and  although 
the  weather  was  beginning  to  be  bitter  cold, 
when  asked  to  choose  between  extra  ammuni- 
tion and  their  blankets,  I  am  told  they  invari- 
ably chose  the  extra  ammunition. 

Oh,  the  joy  of  being  able  to  offer  shelter  for 
at  least  a  few  hours  each  night  in  the  theatre  to 
at  least  a  part  of  these  cold,  lonely,  friendless 
[112] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

souls  and  to  hear  them  laugh  at  our  silly  non- 
sense and  to  make  them  forget  that  they  were 
only  so  much  fodder  to  be  fed  on  the  morrow 
into  the  same  relentless  maw  that  had  swal- 
lowed up  their  comrades  before  them. 

An  unfortunate  thing  happened  one  night, 
Miss  Meredith,  our  ingenue,  was  ill  and  it  had 
been  decided  that  we  had  better  not  attempt 
more  than  one  performance  that  night,  for  in 
addition  to  our  night  work  we  were  playing  the 
Camps  in  the  woods  during  the  day  and  we 
feared  that  the  young  lady  might  lose  her  voice 
entirely. 

The  "Y"  man  failed,  however,  to  post  a 
notice  of  the  second  performance  being  can- 
celled and  when  I  came  out  the  back  entrance 
of  the  theatre,  with  two  others  of  the  Company, 
he  rushed  up  to  me  to  say  that  thousands  of  the 
boys,  out  in  front,  were  clamouring  for  admit- 
tance, and  that  they  had  stood  in  line  for  three 
hours  expecting  a  second  show  and  were  about 
to  break  in  the  door. 

It  was  pitch  black  in  the  streets — no  lights 
were  permitted — not  even  a  pocket  flash — our 
Company  was  stopping  some  distance  from  the 
[113] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

theatre — and  the  others  had  gone  home  some 
time  before  us. 

I  suggested  that  they  open  the  doors  and  let 
the  boys  in  so  that  we  could  explain  to  them. 
The  "Y"  man  said  that  once  they  were  in,  they 
would  demand  a  performance  and  probably 
tear  up  the  place  if  they  didn't  get  it.  He  sug- 
gested that  I  go  round  to  the  front  of  the  thea- 
tre and  speak  to  them  in  the  street.  I  picked 
my  way  through  the  dark  alley  as  well  as  I 
could  and  found  myself  in  the  midst  of  thou- 
sands of  them.  When  the  "Y"  man  told  them 
I  was  there — it  was  so  dark  they  couldn't  see 
me — they  were  quiet  and  attentive  but  when 
I  explained  that  we  could  not  give  a  second 
"show"  they  booed  and  protested.  I  told  them 
that  if  they  would  only  come  again  the  next 
night  we  would  play  all  night  for  them  if  they 
wished  it. 

"We'll  not  be  here  to-morrow  night,"  came  a 
voice  out  of  the  darkness.  "You  needn't 
trouble.  We'll  be  in  the  trenches  to-morrow 
night,"  was  another  bitter  answer,  and  I  knew 
it  was  the  truth. 

By  this  time  I  was  desperate.  I  resolved  to 
rush  back  to  the  two  members  I  had  left  at  the 
[114] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

stage  entrance  and  see  if  we  three  could  not 
give  a  show.  When  I  got  back  through  the 
crowd  and  the  darkness  they  had  gone.  I 
stumbled  up  the  dark  street  as  best  I  could,  the 
"Y"  man  also  having  become  detached  by  now, 
and  I  burst  into  the  room  where  Miss  Meredith 
had  made  ready  for  her  cot.  She  was  in  her 
dressing  gown  and  very  white  but  willing  to 
make  an  attempt  at  another  show  if  I  could  find 
the  others. 

I  looked  in  the  back  part  of  the  building 
where  the  men  were  quartered,  not  one  of  them 
there,  and  at  last  I  fumbled  my  way  back 
through  the  dark  street  to  tell  the  boys  waiting 
at  the  theatre  that  there  was  no  hope  of  an- 
other show.  But  they  had  evidently  divined 
this  and  had  slipped  away  into  the  night,  no 
doubt  cursing  us  in  their  hearts.  I  went  back 
to  our  desolate  little  room  and  sat  by  the  few 
remaining  embers  with  my  head  in  my  hands 
so  tired  and  so  depressed  and  so  sorry  for  the 
bitter  thoughts  that  those  boys  would  carry 
away  with  them  that  I  didn't  care  a  whoop 
whether  I  lived  or  died. 

r 

One  of  the  officers  scolded  me  next  day  when 
[115] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

I  was  still  in  the  dumps  and  said  I  would  never 
make  a  good  soldier  if  I  was  going  to  have  re- 
grets, but  I  did  have  regrets  and  each  day  and 
night  no  matter  to  how  many  men  we  played 
I  was  always  conscious  that  we  would  never 
again  have  the  opportunity  of  playing  to  those 
men  who  had  waited  so  long  that  night  in  the 
dark  and  the  cold  and  who  are  now — God 
knows  where.  And  so  long  as'we  stayed  in 
that  town — no  matter  how  heavy  our  work 
during  the  day,  nor  how  ill  or  tired  we  felt  at 
night,  we  always  gave  our  two  shows,  for  here, 
if  ever,  they  were  needed,  for  day  by  day  and 
night  by  night  the  steady  stream  of  victims  and 
war  implements  never  ceased  passing  under 
our  windows — feeding — feeding — feeding! 

And  soon  came  back  the  returning  stream — 
the  dead  and  the  dying — and  sometimes  came 
with  them  long  lines  of  German  prisoners  be- 
ing marching  to  the  barb  wire  pens  already  pro- 
yided  for  them  further  down  the  line — and 
most  of  these  looked  young,  well  fed  and  con- 
tent to  be  taken. 

Soon  the  temporary  hospitals  in  the  barns 
and  woods  nearby  began  to  fill  and  overflow 
with  the  maimed  and  gassed  and  what  a  pity 
[116] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

that  those  at  home  could  not  have  seen  the  un- 
believable efficiency  with  which  the  great  sani- 
tary experts  and  surgeons  of  our  country  han- 
dled the  hygiene  and  surgical  necessities  of 
situations,  that  men  of  less  resource  would  have 
considered  impossible. 

The  relay  system,  the  tabulation  system,  the 
impromptu  operating  devices,  sterilising  de- 
vices, and  heating  apparatus,  the  specialisation 
for  gas  cases,  psychopathic  cases,  surgical  cases 
and  medical  cases,  handled  in  tents,  stables  or 
sheds  and  the  Herculean  endurance  of  these 
men  who  kept  their  brains  clear  and  their 
hands  steady  for  seventy-two  hours  at  a  stretch. 
Oh,  Humanity,  be  proud!  [You  can  never  be 
proud  enough  of  your  best — never! 

We  tried  sometimes  to  play  to  some  of  the 
men  in  the  hospital  tents  who  had  not  been  too 
seriously  gassed,  for  while  our  nights  were  still 
needed  at  the  theatre  our  days  were  now  com- 
paratively free.  We  found,  however,  that  as 
soon  as  the  patients  were  sufficiently  recov- 
ered to  take  notice  of  us,  they  were  relayed  to 
hospitals  further  down  the  line  in  order  to 
make  way  for  new  cases,  so  we  gave  up  these 
attempts  and  went  back  to  our  old  scheme  of 
[117] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

hunting  out  the  encampments  in  the  woods  or 
playing  to  troops  halted  along  the  roadside. 

One  Sunday  we  were  sent  forward  to  within 
three  miles  of  the  firing  line,  into  woods  that 
had  been  for  the  past  four  years  in  possession 
of  the  Boche.  We  were  to  play  chiefly  to  a 
company  of  engineers  who  had  not  even  seen  a 
woman  in  eighteen  months.  They  had  belonged 
to  one  of  the  detachments  that  go  in  advance 
of  the  attacking  forces  to  cut  the  barb  wire  or 
follow  behind  to  clean  up  the  wreckage  left  in 
the  wake  of  victory.  The  roads  through  the 
deep  rain-soaked  wood  were  almost  impassable 
and  by  the  time  we  reached  the  place  where  we 
were  to  leave  the  car  and  proceed  on  foot  we 
were  already  late.  We  came  upon  our  audience 
still  farther  in  the  thicket  sitting  on  the  wet 
ground,  or  logs,  round  a  stage  that  they  had 
built  and  equipped  from  German  loot  which 
they  had  salvaged  from  the  recent  drive.  It 
was  screened  from  above  by  a  thick  canopy  of 
leaves  and  boughs  so  as  to  escape  detection  by 
the  enemy  planes.  Four  small  German  ma- 
chine guns,  also  salvaged,  served  as  chairs  for 
us  and  the  table  made  from  beech  wood  was 
edged  with  German  shells  and  adorned  with 
[118] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

German  canteens  filled  with  goldenrod — a 
flower  that  apparently  blooms  in  every  coun- 
try. There  was  even  a  piano  salvaged  from  a 
nearby  dugout  that  had  been  occupied  for  four 
years  by  German  officers.  We  inspected  the 
dugout  later  and  found  that  it  was  cement 
lined,  calcimined  and  wired  for  electricity.  The 
piano  which  had  been  originally  captured  by 
the  Boche  from  the  French  was  now  to  be 
played  by  an  American  musician. 

Being  Sunday  the  Army  Chaplain  opened 
the  "show"  with  prayer;  then  standing  we  all 
repeated  the  oath  of  allegiance  with  the  men 
and  officers ;  then  the  regimental  band  that  had 
marched  from  a  camp  some  miles  below  played 
the  National  Anthem,  and  at  intervals  througK 
it  all  came  the  steady  boom  of  the  big  guns, 
slaughtering  while  we  prayed. 

On  our  way  out  of  this  section  we  passed 
through  another  part  of  the  forest.  There 
were  a  great  many  graves  by  the  roadside  made 
for  the  German  dead  during  their  four  years* 
occupation.  The  Huns  had  stolen  tombstones 
from  the  French  Cemeteries  and  painted  Ger- 
man inscriptions  over  the  carved  inscriptions  of 
the  French. 

[119] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

When  still  further  'down  the  line  in  a  deso- 
late little  village  we  were  requested  by  a  Col- 
onel's aide  to  give  a  performance  to  part  of  a 
division  temporarily  quartered  there,  we  did  so 
— on  the  steps  of  a  shelled  cathedral,  the  high- 
est point  of  vantage  in  the  town.  The  men 
stood  on  the  side  of  the  hill  beneath  us.  We  felt 
several  times  that  we  were  losing  their  atten- 
tion, even  though  their  eyes  were  on  us,  and  we 
heard  the  faint  whirrings  of  machines  evidently 
high  in  the  clouds.  One  of  the  officers  confid- 
ed to  us  later  that  he  had  been  obliged  to  have 
the  order  passed  from  man  to  man  not  to  look 
up,  for  he  knew  from  the  peculiar  throbbing  of 
the  engines  that  they  belonged  to  the  enemy 
and  a  sea  of  white  faces  turned  upward  is  far 
easier  to  discern  than  the  tops  of  heads — bald 
heads,  of  course,  excepted.  We  were  growing 
quite  accustomed  to  overhead  enemies  by  now 
but  we  all  looked  up  a  few  days  later  when  we 
were  giving  a  performance  to  what  was  left  of 
an  Oregon  division  and  we  counted  107  of  our 
own  planes  flying  past  at  sunset  in  perfect  for- 
mation toward  the  front.  We  learned  later 
that  some  of  our  friends  of  the  first  pursuit 
group  were  among  them  and  that  they  formed 
[120] 


GROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

part  of  one  of  the  largest  formations  ever  sent 
across  the  German  lines.  And  all  of  them  re- 
turned. 

When  we  got  back  to  our  mess  that  night 
we  were  perfectly  certain  that  some  rumour 
was  going  the  rounds  in  which  we  were  not 
partners  and  the  next  morning  Tommy  Gray 
of  our  unit  who  had  been  sighing  for  a  priest  to 
confess  him  fell  upon  the  information  that  had 
not  yet  reached  even  our  camp  officials. 

After  walking  miles  toward  a  camp  where 
he  arrived  only  to  find  the  Priest  down  with  the 
"flu,"  a  Jewish  Rabbi  undertook  to  guide  him 
to  a  camp  of  the  Seventy- Seventh  Division, 
further  on,  where  he  believed  a  priest  was  to  be 
had  and  to  their  astonishment  they  found  men 
loading  an  aeroplane  with  provisions  and  hom- 
ing pigeons  which  it  was  hoped  they  could  drop 
to  a  battalion  of  their  men  that  had  been  cut 
off  by  the  enemy — a  battalion  that  has  since 
covered  itself  in  glory,  and  become  one  of  the 
picturesque  features  of  the  war. 

It  was  quite  a  feather  in  Tommy's  cap  to 
have  found  out  something  that  none  of  the  men 
in  our  division  actually  knew,  and  while  he 
[121] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

wasn't  encouraged  by  the  officers  to  talk  about 
it  we  had  become  such  close  friends  with  the 
boys  in  the  sergeants'  mess  that  it  somehow 
leaked  out,  and  since  it  only  confirmed  rumours 
which  they  had  already  heard,  it  seemed  rather 
stingy  of  us  to  be  too  reticent  about  it  and 
each  morning  each  asked  his  neighbour  guard- 
edly if  he  had  "heard  anything."  But  it  was 
not  until  weeks  later  that  we  heard  the  details 
of  the  ultimate  fate  of  the  battalion  and  of  the 
stout  heart  of  commander  Whittelsey  who 
shaved  each  morning  with  death  at  his  elbow 
just  to  keep  up  the  morale  of  his  men. 

In  the  meantime  our  friendship  with  the  boys 
in  the  mess  grew  warmer  and  we  used  to  linger 
longer  and  longer  over  our  hot  cakes  and  mo- 
lasses to  hear  the  boys  spin  their  yarns  and 
chaff  each  other. 

Rodeheaver  of  Billy  Sunday  fame  "blew  in" 
for  coffee  one  morning  and  told  us  of  the  songs 
that  he'd  been  singing  in  the  mouths  of  the  can- 
non and  the  boys  responded  with  fifty-seven 
verses  of  a  doughboy  lay  which  seemed  fa- 
miliar to  them  but  was  quite  new  to  me.  It 
was  something  about  a  boy  from  Arkansas  who 
couldn't  bear  to  kill  a  fly  and  what  happened 
[122] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

to  him  at  the  front  and  the  refrain  was  always 
the  same— "Oh  this  bloody,  Bloody  War!" 

Rodeheaver  chuckled  with  delight  and  told 
us  some  funny  stories  and  left  us  laughing 
when  he  said  Good-bye  and  after  he  had  disap- 
peared down  the  alley  the  boys  proceeded  to 
dissect  him  and  religionists  in  general  and  other 
celebrities  of  their  country  and  of  every  other 
fellow's  country  and  there  was  enough  Ameri- 
can humour  forthcoming  from  that  group  to 
have  kept  George  Ade  chronicling  for  the  rest 
of  his  natural  lif e — tender  college  youths,  wild 
western  thoroughbreds,  East  Side  gangsters 
and  country  yokels  all  equally  dear  to  each 
other  and  all  determined  to  have  their  little  joke 
till  the  finish.  One  chubby  faced  youth  with 
an  interrupted  college  career  put  his  chin  in  his 
hands  and  gazed  at  the  fire  and  said  dolefully: 
"To  think  that  one  so  young  as  I  should  have 
been  through  two  wars!"  I  asked  what  he 
meant  and  it  seems  he  had  been  through  both 
the  Mexican  Border  flurry  and  this  and  he  still 
looked  too  young  to  be  out  at  night. 

Only  twice  did  I  ever  see  their  spirits  even 
temporarily  overcast.  The  first  time  was  when 
two  of  the  "casuals"  from  another  division 
[123] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

"helping  out"  in  the  kitchen  were  ordered  back1 
to  the  front.  They,  too,  were  infants,  but  they 
had  already  been  "over  the  top"  once  and  land- 
ed in  hospitals  from  which  they  had  beaten 
their  way  to  this  place  and  now  they  were  off 
for  their  second  chance  with  death.  It  touched 
one's  heart  to  see  the  other  chaps  stuffing  cigar- 
ettes and  chocolate  into  their  pockets  and  dig- 
ging up  mascots  for  them — and  as  the  two  in- 
fants swung  out  the  alley  and  into  the  street 
they  called  back  to  us  gaily,  "Good-bye,  fel- 
lows, see  you  in  New  York  or  hell." 

The  next  morning  at  breakfast  one  of  the 
boys  brought  in  a  letter  on  the  envelope  of 
which  was  scrawled  in  a  fine,  feeble  hand  the 
name  of  a  youth  whom  they  knew  and  in  the 
corner  of  the  envelope  was  this  request  from 
his  mother:  "Will  some  one  please  give  this  to 
my  boy  somewhere  in  France."  The  youth  had 
been  the  chauffeur  of  the  Colonel  in  that  regi- 
ment and  he  had  been  killed  by  an  exploding 
shell  only  that  morning.  The  letter  had  been 
wandering  around  France  for  five  months  and 
had  missed  him  by  only  five  hours.  And  again 
"C'est  la  Guerre.'^  Some  lines  of  Grantland 
[124] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

Rice  came  back  to  me — lines  from  a  Mother's 
Prayer. 

My  baby's  gone ;  gone  is  my  little  lad ; 
And  now  a  man  stands  in  his  place, 
Stands  where  I  cannot  be,  or  see  or  shield. 
God  guard  Thou  him ! 

When  guns  are  still  and  strife  is  overpast. 
Whisper  to  him,  where'er  he  lies  this  night, 
The  words  I  fain  would  speak  could  I  be  near ; 
For,  though  he  is  no  more  a  child, 
I  always  am  his  Mother." 

There  was  a  hush  at  the  table  after  the  direc- 
tions on  the  envelope  had  been  read  aloud  and 
we  all  hailed  the  first  opportunity  of  interrup- 
tion when  one  of  the  boys  rushed  in  from  the 
street  and  told  us  to  "come  and  see  the  fun." 
It  was  pretty  well  over  when  we  arrived  but 
it  had  evidently  had  something  to  do  with  a 
goat  that  was  travelling  as  a  mascot  on  top  of 
one  of  the  big  camions  and  who  had  taken  ad- 
vantage of  the  congestion  of  the  traffic  to  start 
a  little  attack  of  his  own  on  the  unsuspecting 
driver  whose  back  had  been  toward  him. 

In  front  of  the  goat's  vehicle  was  something 
even  more  amusing — an  American  driver 
swearing  at  French  mules  in  English  and  then 
[125]; 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

trying  to  conciliate  them  with  the  few  words  of 
French  that  he  knew. 

I  noticed  that  the  mules  had  no  gas  masks 
tied  under  their  chins  while  all  the  horses  wore 
them  and  I  was  told  that  the  mules  were  so 
"damned  stubborn"  that  nobody  could  ever  get 
the  masks  on  them  in  time  to  save  their  fool 
lives,  so  the  Government  had  given  up  supply- 
ing them  with  them. 

Our  little  street  party  was  broken  up  by  the 
news  that  a  perfectly  good  German  piano  had 
just  been  captured  and  unloaded  on  one  of  the 
salvage  dumps  further  up  the  line  and,  before 
we  knew  it,  the  Mess  Sergeant  and  half  a  doz- 
en of  the  boys  had  got  a  truck  and  were  off 
to  get  that  piano  for  us,  to  replace  the  poor  one 
that  we  were  in  hourly  fear  of  losing  from  the 
.village  "Show  Shop." 

The  fact  that  the  salvage  dump  was  under 
shell  fire  only  heightened  their  enthusiasm  and 
some  of  the  members  of  our  unit  decided  to  go 
with  them.  They  didn't  get  the  piano  but  they 
got  sensations  about  which  they  are  still 
strangely  non-committal  and  the  next  day  when 
I  went  over  the  same  trail  with  one  of  the  offi- 
cers and  saw  the  death  and  desolation  that  lay 
[126] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

either  side  of  it,  I  realised  why  those  returning 
from  it  had  had  nothing  to  say.  "The  Salvage 
Dump!"  What  will  all  Europe  be  after  this 
frightful  struggle  but  one  huge  Salvage 
Dump?  Odds  and  ends  of  wreckage,  animate 
and  inanimate,  heaped  together  on  the  blood- 
soaked  shores  of  the  flood  of  war. 

When  we  woke  next  morning  we  found  a 
large  car  waiting  outside  our  window  to  bear 
us  back  to  Bar-le-duc,  the  headquarters  of  that 
particular  region — and  we  were  told  that  the 
Paris  office  had  been  wiring  for  us  for  days  to 
proceed  to  the  next  "sector"  where  we  were 
long  overdue.  It  was  not  easy  to  say  Good- 
bye to  what  had  been  our  first  real  taste  of  bat- 
tle and  as  our  car  edged  its  way  back  down  the 
line  against  the  steady  stream  of  men  and  mu- 
nitions still  pouring  toward  the  front  and  as 
the  din  of  the  big  guns  grew  fainter  and  fainter 
our  spirits  sank  lower  and  lower. 

At  Bar-le-duc,  however,  where  we  were  to 
stay  for  the  night,  we  were  met  by  "Helios" 
from  every  side  and  in  the  main  hotel  we  found 
war  correspondents  from  New  York,  London, 
and  Paris  and  many  friends  we'd  not  seen  since 
[127] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

the  beginning  of  our  tour  at  G.  H.  Q.  It  was 
by  one  of  these  that  we  were  dubbed  "The 
Mayo  Shock  Unit,"  we  having  been  farther  to 
the  front,  at  that  time,  than  any  other  "Play- 
ers," and  the  title  stuck  to  us  for  the  remainder 
of  our  tour,  much  to  the  temporary  distress  of 
my  mother  who  heard  about  it  without  know- 
ing the  compliment  it  implied.  Bar-le-duc  it 
seemed  had  become  a  non-official  headquarters 
for  all  those  who  needed  to  keep  in  close  touch 
with  everything  going  on  at  the  Argonne  front 
• — journalists,  war  lords,  and  war  heroes,  air 
conquerors  and  naval  attaches. 

In  one  corner  of  the  cafe  munching  cheese 
and  jam  sat  Will  Irwin,  George  Barr  Baker, 
Maximilian  Foster,  Bozeman  Bulger,  Arthur 
Ruhl,  Cameron  McKenzie  and  Charles  Kloeber 
— at  the  other  side  of  the  room  with  their  rum 
and  coffee  were  Damon  Runyon,  Claire  Kena- 
more  and  Eddie  Rickenbacker,  now  the  Amer- 
ican Ace.  Further  on  were  A.  L.  James, 
Douglas  McArthur,  the  youngest  General  in 
the  army,  Allen  of  the  London  Times  and  a 
half  dozen  comrades.  At  the  cashier's  desk 
was  Alexander  Wolcott,  Patron  Saint  of  "the 
Stars  and  Stripes,"  threatening  to  report 
[128] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

"the  joint"  and  have  it  closed  if  the  pro- 
prietor did  not  make  good  a  five  francs  over- 
charge to  one  of  the  doughboys.  It  seemed  as 
if  we  were  in  the  Knickerbocker  Cafe  and  the 
Savoy  Grille  and  the  Crillon  Restaurant  all 
rolled  into  one,  and  then  some  one  mentioned 
Don  Martin  and  that  only  he  out  of  that  whole 
crowd  was  missing.  There  was  a  silence  after 
this,  then  one  of  the  boys  suggested  that  we  all 
walk  round  to  the  Press  headquarters  and  find 
out  what  day  had  been  fixed  for  his  funeral  in 
Paris.  We  stopped  on  the  way  to  look  from 
the  bridge  at  the  sluggish  canal  and  at  the  gay 
coloured  crockery  that  accidentally  decorated 
some  of  the  steps  leading  down  to  it.  At  the 
office  there  was  apparently  little  news  from  the 
front  and  Will  Irwin  fell  into  a  chair  by  the 
fire  and  began  pounding  his  beloved  typewriter. 
The  rest  of  us  had  a  look  at  the  big  map  on  the 
wall  and  felt  vexed  to  see  that  the  horrid  little 
kink  in  the  line,  at  the  foot  of  the  Argonne, 
was  still  unstraightened  and  so  many  lives  had 
been  given  in  the  effort.  Less  stubborn  strong- 
holds were  yielding,  however,  and  the  line  was 
moving  forward  rapidly  and  as  we  returned 
down  the  street  some  one  dared  to  prophecy 
[129] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

that  peace  negotiations  would  be  under  way  by 
Christmas.  This  was  considered  by  the  others 
as  being  highly  absurd  and  one  chap,  who  in- 
sisted that  he  had  come  over  with  the  first  Na- 
poleon, gave  it  as  his  opinion  that  the  blooming 
war  would  never  be  over  and  became  so  de- 
pressed about  it  that  it  was  decided  to  take  him 
into  a  cafe  nearby  where  somebody  had  a  spe- 
cial "pull"  and  could  get  everybody  a  hot  rum 
with  spice  which  was  thought  most  necessary 
by  now  to  counteract  the  cold.  And  over  the 
spiced  rum  the  possible  end  of  the  war  was 
again  discussed  and  when  obliged  to  face  the 
thought  of  a  world  without  a  war  they  became 
more  and  more  melancholy  and  some  one  de- 
cided that  the  least  our  Government  could  do 
for  us  in  such  an  emergency  would  be  to  rent  a 
nice  warm  country  like  Spain  and  allow  those 
who  had  no  other  occupation  to  start  another 
war.  One  preferred  Bulgaria  for  the  cheese, 
another  Palestine  for  the  tangerines  and  some 
one  else  China  because  of  no  "grafters,"  and  by 
the  time  the  map  of  the  world  had  been  covered 
with  imaginary  battles  it  was  decided  that  they 
now  needed  the  cold  to  counteract  the  rum  and 
again  we  ambled  down  the  street. 
[130] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

At  the  French  post  one  of  the  English  boys 
left  us  to  send  a  wire  to  his  "little  French  girl." 
Another  woman  of  my  unit  and  I  pretended 
that  our  vanity  was  hurt  because  he  was  so  will- 
ing to  abandon  our  company,  upon  which  he 
remarked:  "There  is  no  satisfaction  in  you 
American  women  because  your  brains  never 
cease  to  function." 

When  we  got  back  to  the  "Y"  we  found 
our  old  chauffeur,  "Conde — the  speed  maniac" 
— loading  papers  and  cigarettes  into  a  large 
army  car  in  front  of  the  door.  He  was 
blissfully  happy,  having  received  permission  to 
make  one  trip  each  day  to  the  very  front  line,  if 
he  could  get  there,  to  deliver  those  things  to  the 
boys.  He  had  to  drive  all  night  to  get  back  in 
time  to  make  the  next  day's  trip,  but  was  per- 
fectly satisfied  with  the  three  hours  sleep  that 
he  got  each  morning.  Upstairs  other  packages 
of  papers  and  cigarettes  were  being  prepared 
for  some  one  who  was  to  drop  them  over  the 
fighting  front  from  aeroplanes.  One  of  the  by- 
standers suggested  that  the  Secretary  had  bet- 
ter put  some  "Y"  cards  with  the  gifts  or  the 
boys  would  think  that  the  "Knights  of  Colum- 
[131] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

bus"  had  sent  them.  The  busy  little  Secretary 
answered  that  he  didn't  care  if  the  boys  thought 
they  came  from  God  so  long  as  they  got  them 
and  this  is  probably  what  the  boys  did  think. 

We  went  into  the  next  room  to  inquire  for 
our  mail  and  I  found  a  second  and  more  insist- 
ent telegram  from  Paris  saying  that  it  was 
most  important  that  we  report  back  there  at 
once.  I  couldn't  imagine  anything  more  im- 
portant than  the  work  we  were  leaving  at  the 
front  but  we,  in  our  small  way,  were  also  sol- 
diers and  under  orders  and  as  soon  as  we  could 
get  the  necessary  travel  papers  we  caught  the 
night  train  for  Paris.  It  was  impossible  to  get 
sleepers  or  reserved  seats,  for  every  available 
comfort  was  retained  for  the  wounded  and  all 
trains  were  running  out  of  schedule  to  make 
way  for  the  "Blesses." 

No  lights  were  permitted  in  any  of  the  com- 
partments and  at  each  station  mobs  of  desper- 
ate travellers  forced  their  way  into  our  pitch 
black  compartments,  fell  over  our  feet  and  our 
baggage,  sat  upon  us  and  cursed  us  as  we 
cursed  them  and  the  entire  night's  ride  to  Paris 
consisted  of  a  series  of  pitched  battles  between 
[132] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

those  in  the  train  and  those,  at  way  stations,  at- 
tempting to  get  into  it. 

When  we  finally  reached  headquarters  we 
found  that  we  were  to  be  sent  next  into  the 
quarantined  camps  in  the  S.  O.  S.  where  the 
Spanish  Grippe  and  the  Flu  had  necessitated 
the  men's  being  shut  up  for  weeks  with  no  di- 
version and  where  the  inaction  was  making  sav- 
ages of  them. 

It  was  not  an  easy  matter  to  leave  the  big 
guns  so  far  behind  but  we  were  promised  that 
if  we  would  go  into  the  S.  O.  S.  for  two  weeks 
that  we  might  return  to  the  Front  at  the  end 
of  that  time.  I  shook  my  head  and  answered 
that  the  fighting  would  be  over  before  we  ever 
got  back  to  the  front.  The  "Y"  secretary  said, 
we'd  be  lucky  if  the  war  was  over  in  two  years, 
but  as  it  turned  out  I  was  right. 

I  find  it  as  difficult  to  write  of  the  S.  O.  S.  as 
our  men  find  it  to  go  there,  or  to  remain  there, 
and  yet  many  of  our  true  heroes  are  there  and 
have  been  there  since  the  beginning  of  the  war. 
There  has  been  no  pomp,  glory  nor  excitement 
for  them.  They  have  had  to  play  the  unpic- 
turesque  role  of  "The  Man  Behind  the  Gun"' — 
I  dare  say  there  are  not  ten  amongst  all  those 
[133] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

thousands  that  go  to  make  up  the  great  belly 
of  the  sea  that  sends  its  waves  toward  the  front, 
who  would  not  gladly  have  risked  arms,  legs, 
and  life  itself,  any  and  every  hour  of  the  day  in 
preference  to  the  enforced  safety  of  those  who 
must  prepare  the  ways  and  means  for  those  who 
reap  death  and  decoration.  Mothers  and 
sweethearts  and  those  at  home  take  care  that 
no  shade  of  disappointment  crosses  your  face 
when  your  returning  man  tells  you  that  he  did 
not  get  up  to  "the  front."  Remember  that  it 
takes  seven  men  back  of  the  line  to  keep  one 
man  in  the  line  and  that  your  Government,  not 
your  son  or  sweetheart,  has  "the  say"  as  to  who 
the  lucky  seventh  shall  be  who  goes  over  the 
top,  and  remember,  too,  that  it  is  the  consensus 
of  opinion  of  those  who  have  dealt  in  this  bloody 
business  that  "there  are  no  cowards." 

Then,  too,  you'll  hear  tales  of  misfits,  men 
reduced  in  rank,  or  relieved  of  their  command, 
— this  does  not  prove  cowardice,  it  means  only 
that  in  the  business  of  war  as  in  the  business  of 
life  some  men,  many  men,  through  no  fault  of 
their  own  get  shoved  into  the  wrong  cubby 
holes.  These  must  be  re-classified. 

In  one  of  the  big  re-classification  centres  in 
[134] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

the  S.  O.  S.  I  found  the  following  lines  by  Rob- 
ert Freeman  printed  on  a  little  pamphlet  in  the 
hall  of  the  "Y"  Hut.: 

t 

I  played  with  my  blocks,  I  was  but  a  child, 
Houses  I  builded,  castles  I  piled; 
But  they  tottered  and  fell,  all  my  labour  was  vain. 
Yet  my  father  said  kindly:     "Well  try  it  again!" 

I  played  with  my  days.     What's  time  to  a  lad? 
Why  pore  over  books?     Play!     Play,  and  be  glad! 
Till  my  youth  was  all  spent,  like  a  sweet  summer  rain. 
Yet  my  father  said  kindly:    "Well  try  it  again!" 

I  played  withi  my  chance.     Such  gifts  as  were  mine 
To  work  with,  to  win  with,  to  serve  the  divine, 
I  seized  for  myself,  for  myself  they  have  lain. 
Yet  my  father  says  kindly:    "Well  try  it  again!" 

I  played  with  my  soul,  the  soul  that  is  I; 
The  best  that  is  in  me,  I  smothered  the  cry, 
I  lulled  it,  I  dulled  it — and  now,  oh,  the  pain! 
Yet  my  father  says  kindly :    "Well  try  it  again !" 

Our  only  glimpse  of  home  life  in  the  S.  O.  S. 
was  provided  by  Mrs.  Mallon,  the  matron  of 
the  "Y"  hut  at  Saumur — only  this  time  the 
"hut"  Happened  to  be  a  handsome  chateau  con- 
verted into  a  social  haven  for  the  men  and  of- 
[135] 


GROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

ficers  of  the  big  artillery  training  camp.  There 
were  large  cosy  arm  chairs  in  front  of  the  open 
fire,  and  books  to  read  and  a  piano  and  a  writ- 
ing room  and  a  dainty  tea  table  where  chocolate 
and  cakes  were  served  each  afternoon  and  on 
the  mantel  the  photograph  of  Mrs.  Mallon  in 
the  centre  of  a  large  family  group. 

She  saw  me  glance  at  the  photograph  and  the 
colour  crept  up  to  the  edge  of  her  lovely  snowy 
hair.  A  little  later  she  bent  over  me  and  whis- 
pered: "It's  in  awful  taste  for  me  to  have  that 
photograph  there  but  it  encourages  the  boys  to 
tell  me  more  about  themselves  when  they  real- 
ise that  I  am  the  mother  of  that  family,"  and 
still  later,  by  the  fire  that  night,  she  told  me 
how  many  boys  out  of  a  sense  of  chivalry  and, 
not  knowing  the  French  customs,  would  find, 
after  calling  a  few  times  on  a  French  girl,  that 
they  were  considered  by  the  family  to  be  en- 
gaged to  her  and  rather  than  place  her  in  an 
awkward  position  they  would  often  place  them- 
selves in  a  very  unhappy  one  and  would  be 
breaking  their  hearts  in  secret  because  of  the 
girl  at  home  whom  they  really  loved. 

She  said  she  used  to  watch  them  day  after 
day  when  they  began  to  droop  and  lose  heart 
[136] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

and  very  often  they  would  finally  ask  her  about 
her  boys  and  little  by  little  they  would  confide 
in  her  and  permit  her  to  help  them  out  of  dif- 
ficulties with  which  she  with  her  worldly  knowl- 
edge and  experience  knew  how  to  cope. 

~Not  all  of  the  men  in  this  town  were  there  for 
re-classification.  Many  of  them  belonged  to 
the  light  artillery  that  was  fighting  sham  bat- 
tles each  day  on  the  planes  just  back  of  the 
town  and  straining  to  get  into  "the  real  thing" 
• — others  were  there  for  cavalry  training  and 
it  was  a  wonderful  sight  to  see  them  sitting 
their  horses  so  splendidly  and  taking  the  jumps 
on  a  field  where  Napoleon  himself  had  trained. 

From  the  artillery,  cavalry,  and  re-classifi- 
cation camps  of  the  S.  O.  S.  we  passed  into 
what  is  known  as  "The  Forbidden  City" — a 
name  given  to  Tours  by  the  men  in  the  smaller 
towns  near  it,  who  are  forbidden  to  enter  it. 
Perhaps  this  is  because  America  already  has 
more  men  there  than  can  be  comfortably  disci- 
plined in  one  town — for  grey-roofed,  mud-rid- 
den Tours  is  the  very  hub  of  the  wheel  of 
[America's  war  industry  in  Europe — a  wheel 
with  spokes  pointing  toward  Paris  and  the 
[137] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

fighting  fron?  beyond  it,  toward  Switzerland, 
Italy,  the  South  of  France — in  any,  and  all  di- 
rections, where  we  are  obliged  to  deal  in  the 
ways  and  means  of  butchery  and  its  after  ef- 
fects. Outside  the  city  walls  were  miles  of 
tracks  laid  by  our  engineers,  acres  of  railroad 
yards  devoted  to  the  loading  and  shipping  of 
our  war  implements  and  food  supplies,  trucks, 
automobiles,  aeroplanes  and  hospital  equip- 
ment— and  within  the  city  walls  the  streets 
teeming  with  our  army  officials,  engineers,  car- 
penters, mechanicians,  telephone  girls  and  tech- 
nical experts.  For  instance  some  of  the  finest 
watch  makers  are  needed  for  the  delicate  ad- 
justments of  the  aeroplane  mechanism  and  I 
was  told  that  the  superintendent  of  the  Wal- 
tham  Watch  works  was  putting  in  ten  hours  a 
day  in  Tours  as  one  of  Uncle  Sam's  dollar  a 
day  men — and  that  he  was  one  of  many  rich 
volunteers  from  America's  business  world  who 
were  sacrificing  fortune  and  family  comfort 
without  any  hope  of  recognition  for  service  be- 
yond that  given  them  by  their  own  soul's  ap- 
proval. 

Tours  was  a  little  world  of  itself,  and  with 
the  military  and  the  industrial  factions  run- 
[138] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

ning  hand  in  hand  or  rather  watching  each 
other  out  of  the  corner  of  the  eye  one  got  that 
uncomfortable  feeling  of  hidden  treachery,  se- 
cret rebellion,  sullen  fear  and  hate  that  I  used 
to  feel  under  the  smiling  surface  of  Germany's 
suavity  or  sometimes  under  the  smooth  waters 
at  Salt  Lake  City. 

It  is  a  condition  that  arises  out  of  the  disci- 
plining of  the  every  detail  and  thought  of  lives 
that,  robbed  of  their  natural  freedom,  feel  jus- 
tified in  cheating  the  oppressor  who  has  robbed 
them,  and  then  follows  suspicion  and  hatred 
and  intrigue  and  frantic  striving  for  power  lest 
one  be  destroyed  lacking  it,  and  the  next  evolu- 
tion is  called  politics  and  out  of  that  grows  cor- 
ruption, dishonesty  and  every  other  horror  and 
the  end  of  it  all  is  open  war.  And  in  a  small 
way  the  little  Kingdom  of  Tours  while  loyal  to 
the  country  of  its  birth  and  fervent  toward  the 
cause  that  it  was  pledged  to  serve,  seemed  to 
me  to  be  going  through  all  the  internal  agony 
of  a  militarised  industrial  centre  and  I  knew 
once  and  for  all  that  I  should  rather  be  dead 
than  obliged  to  live  long  in  any  atmosphere 
where  one  must  be  eternally  on  the  alert  against 
the  subtle  tyrannies  of  a  military  government,, 
[139] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

I  was  homesick  for  the  big  free  spirit  at  the 
front  where  each  man  took  it  for  granted  that 
his  fellow  was  more  than  equal  to  looking  after 
his  own  job  and  I  wished — as  they  wished — 
that  each  man  in  Tours  could  have  a  breath  of 
"the  air  up  there"  even  though  it  might  even- 
tually be  charged  with  gas.  Anything  was 
better  than  this  heaviness  and  dullness  and 
drabness.  I  was  thankful  when  our  work  here 
was  done.  In  fact  we  played  two  performances 
here  each  night — and  most  days — not  altogeth- 
er out  of  kindness  of  heart — but  in  order  to 
cover  this  area  that  much  sooner  and  be  on  our 
way. 

In  the  next  town  we  arrived  late,  having  been 
sent  by  motor  and  lost  our  way — not  so  late 
however  as  we  should  have  been  by  train  for 
the  tracks  were  now  so  congested  by  "blesse" 
trains  relaying  the  wounded  to  hospitals  fur- 
ther down  the  line  that  all  train  schedules  had 
been  practically  abandoned.  We  were  hustled 
into  another  car  with  very  little  supper  and 
were  again  driven  miles  through  the  cold  to  the 
outskirts  of  the  town  where  we  played  to  an 
audience  of  twenty-five  hundred  men  who  had 
[140] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

been  in  quarantine  for  "ages"  as  they  said  and 
who  were  feeling  perfectly  desperate  for  a 
break  in  the  monotony. 

One  of  the  "Y"  women  and  a  Red  Cross 
nurse  came  back  to  the  dressing  room  of  the 
hut  to  tell  me  confidentially  that  the  men  had 
worked  until  seven  that  night  decorating  a  new 
hall  that  they  themselves  had  renovated  and 
painted  and  that  they  had  been  scheming  for 
days  to  "get  up"  a  supper  after  the  show  and 
would  be  heart  broken  unless  we  came.  We  all 
looked  at  each  other  in  despair  for,  in  spite  of 
having  had  better  living  accommodations  in  the 
S.  O.  S.  than  on  any  other  part  of  the  tour,  the 
depressed  state  of  the  men  to  whom  we  played, 
or  the  great  number  of  hospital  shows,  or  the 
constant  rain  or  something  or  other  had  pulled 
us  down  in  a  few  days  more  than  all  the  real 
hardships  at  the  front — and  we  were  so  tired, 
as  one  of  the  girls  put  it,  that  our  very  souls 
ached.  The  men  of  our  unit  tried  to  explain 
this  for  us  but  the  inevitable  answer  came  back 
— "Just  come  for  a  few  minutes.  They  haven't 
seen  any  girls  for  so  long.  It  will  do  them  so 
much  good."  We  knew  the  speech  by  heart 
and  we  had  often  responded  to  it  when  we  were 
[141] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

longing  and  aching  for  our  beds,  and  to-night 
on  the  way  out  we  had  pledged  ourselves  to 
each  other  not  to  give  in  to  it  again,  and  now  we 
were  all  ashamed  to  refuse  them  and  also 
ashamed  to  go  back  on  our  word  to  ourselves 
and  to  each  other. 

I  looked  at  the  weaker  of  the  two  girls  and 
said :  "Well,  how  about  it  ?"  She  answered  that 
she  would  do  whatever  the  rest  of  us  did. 

The  men  of  our  unit  argued,  and  truthfully, 
that  it  was  the  girls  that  the  boys  wanted  to  see 
and  that  they  would  never  be  missed  and  were 
going  home. 

When  we  saw  how  hard  the  boys  must  have 
(worked  to  decorate  the  barracks  and  with  what 
pleasure  they  watched  each  course  of  the  sup- 
per come  onto  the  long  tables  we  were  glad 
that  we  had  not  disappointed  them  but,  Ye 
gods,  there  were  hundreds  of  them  and  they 
had  a  band  waiting  to  play  dance  music  and 
there  were  only  three  of  us. 

I  shall  never  forget  that  dance — it  seemed  to 
me  I'd  only  been  turned  in  one  direction  when 
some  one  from  out  the  long  lines  of  uniforms 
that  penned  us  in  would  seize  me  and  turn  me 
round  in  another  direction  and  some  one  else 
[142] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

would  snatch  me  from  him  and  step  on  me,  and 
then  release  me  to  another  before  he'd  even 
consoled  me  and  so  on  and  so  on  for  hours  and 
here  and  there  out  of  the  corner  of  my  eye  I 
could  catch  fleeting  glimpses  of  a  pink  dress 
and  a  tan  coloured  dress  and  I  knew  the  same 
thing  was  happening  to  the  other  two  girls. 

Some  time  later  on  we  leaned  backed  in  the 
car  too  exhausted  to  speak.  When  we  were 
about  half  way  home  one  of  the  girls  said 
wearily — "Well,  I've  only  one  life  to  give  for 
my  country,  thank  God !" 

And  the  next  morning  I  thought  my  time 
had  come  to  give  mine.  The  expected  had  hap- 
pened— after  dancing  with  men  just  recover- 
ing from  Flu  and  just  taking  it  on — I'd  got 
one  of  the  "going  or  coming"  germs  and  it  was 
only  by  the  aid  of  all  my  will  power,  Mr.  Mor- 
risey's  rum,  and  Miss  Brice's  quinine,  that  I 
was  able  to  keep  going  until  we  had  played  our 
last  performance  in  the  S.  O.  S. — temperature 
104 — and  fallen  exhausted  into  the  first  train 
that  would  get  us  back  to  Paris. 

Three  times  we  were  booked  out  of  Paris  to 
return  to  the  front  and  as  many  times  were  we 
stopped  by  delays  in  travelling  permits,  illness, 
[143] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

this,  that  or  the  other,  and  before  we  could 
make  a  fourth  attempt  came  rumours  of  the  ap- 
proaching armistice  and  with  the  probability 
of  a  rapid  shifting  of  troops  it  was  decided  to 
send  no  more  entertainers  north  until  some- 
thing decisive  could  be  learned  so,  as  I  had 
predicted,  we  never  again  reached  "the  Front." 
Instead,  we  played  the  remaining  ten  days 
of  our  signed  service  in  and  around  Paris,  at 
Long  Champs  once  the  fashionable  racing 
course,  now  converted  into  an  army  transporta- 
tion headquarters,  at  the  Palais  de  Glace,  once 
the  old  skating  rink,  now  the  "Y"  Theatre,  at 
the  Soldiers  and  Sailors*  Club,  the  Pavilion 
and  other  places,  and  while  there  was  very  little 
thrill  in  playing  under  such  normal  conditions 
there  was  at  least  the  interest  of  daily  and  con- 
flicting rumours  from  the  front  and  one  night 
on  our  way  home  from  the  Palais  de  Glace 
where  we  had  played  to  twenty-five  hundred 
cheering  men  and  seen  so  many  New  Yorkers 
in  the  audience  that  we  almost  thought  it  a  first 
night,  we  met  the  French  people  surging 
through  the  streets,  their  arms  round  each  other 
— and  we  were  told  that  the  Kaiser  had  been 
dethroned  and  that  Berlin  was  in  the  throes  of 
[144] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

revolution.  There  was  an  hour's  pandemonium 
in  the  streets  of  Paris  and  every  one  devoutly 
hoped  the  Huns  were  wreaking  upon  the  Kai- 
ser some  of  the  vengeance  that  we  should  have 
liked  to  wreak  on  him. 

And  then  came  the  morning  of  November 
the  llth  when  all  ears  were  open  for  the  sound 
of  the  cannon  that  should  proclaim  the  signing 
of  the  armistice.  I  myself  heard  nothing,  but 
at  noon  boys  began  parading  down  the  Avenue 
de  1'Opera  with  flags — their  hands  on  each 
other's  shoulders.  By  two  o'clock  the  streets 
were  swarming  with  men,  women  and  children, 
marching  aimlessly  back  and  forth,  hugging 
and  kissing  each  other  and  sometimes  trying  to 
sing  the  Marseillaise. 

At  three  o'clock  when  I  looked  down  on  the 
Place  de  1'Opera  from  the  top  of  the  Equit- 
able Building,  where  I  had  joined  friends,  the 
streets  were  a  mosaic  of  black,  blue  and  tan, 
the  red  caps  of  the  French  soldiers  with  their 
yellow  cross  bars  standing  out  like  sunflowers 
amongst  the  more  sombre  colours  of  the  sway- 
ing masses  of  humans  below  us.  Occasional  ve- 
hicles overladen  with  shouting  soldiers  made 
[145] 


GROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

their  way  here  and  there  through  the  streets  but 
these  were  few  and  far  between  and  there  were 
no  bands  or  horns  available  to  help  out  the 
voices  that  were  trying  to  sing.  I 

Across  the  street  from  us  in  front  of  the  Rue 
de  la  Paix,  it  soon  became  the  fashion  for 
American  and  French  soldiers,  hands  on  shoul- 
ders, to  form  in  long  lines  and  march  into  the 
bar  of  the  cafe  for  a  drink. 

We  watched  the  crowds  without  finding 
much  variety  in  their  antics  until  the  wonderful 
Paris  twilight  began  to  wrap  the  distant 
steeples  and  turrets  in  mist.  Opposite  us  the 
victory  group  on  top  of  the  Paris  Opera  House 
was  silhouetted  sharply  against  the  sky  and 
just  underneath  it  the  siren  that  had  sounded  so 
many  alarms  to  terrified  Paris  in  the  four 
dreadful  years  just  passed,  seemed  to  be  brood- 
ing on  its  lost  occupation  and  I  wondered  how 
many  years  it  would  be  before  all  the  "Cave  de 
Secours"  signs  would  have  disappeared  from 
over  the  cellarways  that  had  so  long  offered 
sanctuary  to  the  fleeing. 

With  friends  of  the  Marine  Corps  I  drove 
down  to  the  Place  de  la  Concorde  out  through 
the  Champs  Elysee  and  into  the  Bois. 
[146] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

The  guns  from  the  submarine  on  the  Seine 
were  still  booming  their  tidings  of  victory  as 
we  neared  the  Arc  de  Triomphe.  A  proces- 
sion of  French  men  and  women  bearing  the 
flags  and  banners  of  the  Allies  swept  through 
the  splendid  opening  and  on  toward  the  Bois, 
singing  the  Marseillaise. 

As  we  passed  further  into  the  Bois  we  saw 
no  one  save  here  and  there  a  pair  of  strolling 
lovers,  unmindful  of  any  tumult,  save  that  in 
their  own  hearts.  And  ephemeral  things,  such 
as  war,  and  immortal  things,  such  as  love, 
seemed  once  again,  after  four  years  of  night- 
mare, to  slip  into  their  rightful  proportions  to 
each  other. 

The  haze  grew  more  dense,  little  lakes  here 
and  there  were  barely  discernible,  the  tall 
groups  of  poplars,  in  some  of  the  more  open 
spaces  looked  ghostlike  and  majestic  against 
the  poorly  lighted  sky.  And  nature,  as  though 
pitying  the  tired  hearts  and  worn  nerves  of 
its  war-weary  victims,  wrapped  lovers  and  lone 
souls  alike,  in  one  of  those  soft  enfolding  nights 
that  seem  to  bless  and  restore. 

We  returned  by  way  of  "The  Dolphin," 
found  ourselves  the  only  guests  there,  drank 
[147] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

our  tea,  port,  or  champagne-cocktails  with  what 
spirit  of  conquest  we  could  muster,  and  reached 
the  edge  of  the  Bois  just  as  a  searchlight  shot 
a  long  yellow  stream  of  flame  from  the  Eifel 
tower.  It  was  the  first  time  the  tower  had  been 
lit  since  the  war  and  it  was  the  most  lovely  and 
most  thrilling  moment  of  the  day's  demonstra- 
tion. 

The  crowds  were  becoming  more  subdued 
and  less  dense  as  we  reached  the  hotel  at  the  far 
end  of  the  Tuileries  Gardens. 

I  had  barely  time  to  dress  before  our  final 
performance  at  the  Pavilion  and,  in  one  way, 
all  the  unit  were  glad  to  be  playing,  for  each 
one  of  them  was  too  highly  keyed  by  the  day's 
events  to  want  to  stay  in  doors. 

The  performance  seemed  like  an  anti-climax 
after  the  one  we  had  given  the  previous  Satur- 
day night  at  the  Palais  de  Glace  and  both  we 
and  our  audience  were  eager  to  get  into  the 
street  again  and  be  a  part  of  the  mob. 

Both  feigned  enthusiasm,  however,  and  at 
last  we  sang  our  final  chorus,  as  a  unit,  having 
played  to  more  than  one  hundred  and  twenty 
five  thousand  American  men  in  France. 

So  ended  our  last  three  months,  as  an  official 
[148] 


TROUPING    FOR    THE    TROOPS 

unit,  also  the  last  three  months  of  the  war.  In 
spite  of  all  efforts  to  hasten  our  departure  from 
America,  Fate  had  timed  our  finish,  to  a  day, 
to  the  finish  of  the  fighting  in  Franca 


THE  END 


[149] 


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